Rockingham County was 1 of 8 counties chosen to expand an EMS-based Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) Bridge program.

Wentworth, NC (February 23, 2023) – Rockingham County Department of Health and Human Services is set to receive $350,000 to combat the opioid crisis that the nation faces. This funding comes from a federal grant intended to expand first responder and social worker efforts to help reduce the number of opioid overdose related deaths seen throughout the state of North Carolina. 

   Rockingham County was one of the eight counties chosen to expand an EMS-based Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) Bridge program. Rockingham County initiated a Post Overdose Response Team (PORT) in 2020.  This Initiative is a collaborative effort between the Eden and Reidsville Police Departments, Daymark Recovery Services, the County’s DHHS Integrated Health Care Program along with other supportive community partners.  The intent of this initiative is to follow up with individuals, who have an unintended opioid overdose, within 24-72 hours when Narcan was administered but refuse transportation to the hospital. In January 2023, Rockingham County Emergency Services responded to 19 suspected opioid overdose encounters, as compared to 21 in January 2022 (NC Injury and Violence Prevention, February 14, 2023).    

   These funds will be utilized to expand the harm reduction efforts already being implemented by the PORT initiative. Community Paramedics with the Integrated Health Care Team will be allowed to administer Suboxone to patients who are interested in beginning treatment for their substance use disorder. This allows immediate access to treatment and reduces the chance of a future overdose event, while allowing staff to help them access ongoing treatment resources. During the past quarter, staff from the Integrated Health Care Program have contacted 50% of individuals who experienced an overdose, and 43% of those individuals accepted some type of assistance.

   “We believe that this will enhance treatment by making it more readily available in the community for those affected by opioid use.” Program Manager, Carye Dickerson said, “We will increase their potential for successful outcomes in the management of their opioid use disorder.”

   This federal money comes from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and will be allocated to the Integrated Health Program under Rockingham County’s Health and Human Services umbrella. Funds will be reimbursed based on County reports and should be utilized, in full, by September 30, 2025, and enhance the work that has been ongoing since 2020.

   The department’s mission statement for the Integrated Health Care Program is to align existing community resources around medical care, mental health care, medical transportation and other resources to increase effectiveness and efficiency of care through a multi-faceted assessment to generate a shared, integrated care plan for the most vulnerable population in our community.

The department’s goal moving forward is to prevent death by unintended opioid overdose and to expand our Post Overdose Response Program to other areas of the county in order to reach as many victims as possible to assist them in receiving treatment for their opioid substance abuse disorder  

For more information call Carye Dickerson at 336-342-1394 ext. 7048 or visit our Integrated Healthcare page on our county website.

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Watch this video of the new Winston-Salem Police Chief being sworn in with his remarks. This happened on February 15, 2023.

Rockingham County’s Eden Morehead High School Panthers were well represented this weekend at the State Wrestling Tournament held at the Greensboro Coliseum. All the students competed well, but Eli Horton and Jared Thomas takes 1st place at the NCHSAA State Championship Tournament. The wrestling team put up this Facebook post in celebration.

The Danville Police Department is seeking the identities of two suspects from a convenience store robbery that occurred Wednesday evening, Feb. 15.

Around 8:40 p.m. Wednesday, the Sunrise convenience store in the 500 block of Memorial Drive reported two black males entered the store.

One of the males, described as six feet tall in a gray jacket was masked and armed with a machete. The other male, described as five foot, six inches tall wearing a multicolored jacket, was armed with a handgun and demanded the cashier open the register.

Both men left the store with an undisclosed amount of cash and cigarettes. They were last seen leaving the store on foot.

No one was injured during the incident.

Anyone who has information is asked to please contact the Danville Police Department through any platform, including patrol at 434-799-6510, investigations at 434-799-6508, calling 911, contacting Crime Stoppers at 434-793-0000, approach any officer you see, through social media, via email crimetips@danvilleva.gov, or use our crime tips app CARE at https://www.p3tips.com/tipform.aspx?ID=818#.

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The City of Danville’s Information Technology Department has launched a new real estate dashboard that shows valid residential sales in the city over a rolling three-year period.

The Sales Analysis Dashboard was developed in conjunction with the Finance Department’s real estate division.

“The ArcGIS dashboards enable us to convey information by presenting location-based analytics using intuitive and interactive data on a single screen,” said Scott Longerbeam, geographic information systems (GIS) coordinator for the Information Technology Department. “These dashboards are used to help make decisions, visualize trends, monitor status in real time, and inform our community.”

The Sales Analysis Dashboard displays the following information:

• Total sales amount.
• Average sale price.
• Total number of sales.

“This sales data can further be filtered by predetermined areas, such as the northern or southern parts of the city, or by the tax grids, with the values directly reflecting the areas chosen,” Longerbeam said.

Users can select multiple tax grid areas at once, filter the selection by price or by date, as well as select via a user defined rectangle, circle, or custom polygon area.

“Users can also click on individual sale points to access a pop-up containing some basic information about the parcel, a picture of the house, and a direct link to our Parcel Viewer application for a more in-depth look,” he added.

The GIS division of the Department of Information Technology oversees the Parcel Viewer application, as well as the use and development of other location-based information systems.

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Super Bowl car ads sell Americans the idea that new tech will protect them

Super Bowl ads tend to kick off trends, and it looks like the automotive industry will ramp up its pitch for electric vehicles after giving them center stage. Even Tesla, which has never run a Super Bowl ad, managed to sneak its Model Y into a Popeyes commercial, while Ram boasted that its new electric pickup truck’s smart technology solved the problems of “premature electrification” that left consumers unsatisfied.

But it was an ad paid for by the Dawn Project, a safety advocacy group, that will likely trigger a fleet of ads this year to reassure consumers that EV technology is safe.

In it, Tesla’s self-driving cars run down child-sized mannequins. Tesla CEO Elon Musk shrugged off the ad, tweeting that even bad publicity would end up promoting Tesla’s self-driving cars.

As a media scholar interested in how cultures deal with disruptive technology, I see similarities between today’s concerns over EVs and the early days of cars.

Back then, the public conversation usually contained a mix of optimism and fear. Then automakers turned to advertising to allay those fears.

Sound signals and safety

As it happens, advertising safer technology is as old as the automotive industry.

Because automobiles can endanger human life, engineers have long been trying to solve their safety problems. In the early 20th century, along with better brakes, headlights and steering wheels, engineers promised that advances in sound signaling technology – the car horn – would make driving safer by letting people know a car was coming.

In my new book, “Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History,” I tell the story of early sound signals. At first, engineers adapted the bells, gongs and whistles from other types of conveyances to automobiles. But eventually the industry settled on the squeeze bulb horn – the kind that makes a “honk honk” noise.

The only issue? In crowded streets, they weren’t loud enough to hear.

So in 1909, a new horn from the Lovell-McConnell company called the Klaxon solved that problem, promising drivers the ability, with just the touch of an electric button, to let loose a metallic “aaOOga” sound so loud that no one could miss it. They quickly set to work to convince the public that their patented noisy technology made driving safer.

Klaxon’s ad campaign used a new technique called “situational advertising” that put readers in imaginary situations where they were given a choice. Many of these ads, run in some of the era’s most popular magazines, asked readers to consider the best way to protect themselves from other people’s carelessness.

One Klaxon ad from a 1910 issue of the Saturday Evening Post portrays a distracted pedestrian stepping in front of a car in New York City’s Herald Square with the tag line “You Can’t Change Human Nature.”

“The auto must have a signal that really warns,” reads the copy. “If all minds were always alert – if children could protect themselves – if the weak were strong, there would be no need of any auto signal.”

And so the ad suggests that the only responsible solution for car owners is to own a Klaxon, because its distinctive noise said “AUTO COMING! LOOK OUT! NOW!”

Quieter tech to keep drivers safe

People bought the medium and the message. For two decades, Klaxon dominated the global car horn market and pumped its technocentric safety message into the media ecosystem.

But reliance on loud signaling technology to keep people safe became an odious proposition after the traumas of World War I, when Klaxons were used in the trenches as a gas alarm. In the postwar period, a transnational culture war against noise took off.

So societies everywhere turned to different forms of technology, like traffic lights, to solve the safety problem that noisy car horns could not. The Klaxon went into diminuendo as engineers turned their attention to the problems of quieting automobile noise with muffling technologies such as closed cabins and “silent gearwheels.”

Yet though their focus changed, the underlying message did not: Emerging technologies could always solve the problems caused by existing ones.

Smart technology promising less thinking

Flash forward to today and you can see that the more things change in technology advertising, the more they stay the same.

Consider a recent commercial for the Volkswagen Atlas that ran during football games all season – and which eerily echoes the Klaxon ad from 1910.

Titled “Those Guys,” the clever ad shows a wired-in zoomer, transfixed by his smartphone and oblivious to the world around him, walking the streets while Doris Day’s “It’s a Lovely Day Today” plays in the background. Like the man in the 1910 Klaxon ad, this guy steps right in front of a moving Atlas. But, thanks to its “Standard Front Assist and Pedestrian Monitoring” technology, the car brakes automatically and everyone is safe.

Obviously, the situation portrayed in the ad has changed. Today’s new quiet technology protects both pedestrian and driver from harm by sensing movement and automatically braking, so it doesn’t really matter whether either is warned.

But the subtext remains the same: Since you can’t change human nature and there will always be “those guys,” rest assured that emerging technology “built with safety in mind” can protect us.

And no matter what gadget the advertisers are trying to sell, that underlying technocentrism – a civic religion in American consumer culture that is practically as important as football – is a constant you can count on.

So whether it’s noisy horns, self-driving cars, smart speakers or cryptocurrency, people are bombarded with messages encouraging them to adopt new technology – without stopping to consider if they really need what companies are selling.

Matthew Jordan, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bills filed in the Tennessee General Assembly would prevent governmental agencies from requiring vaccines or immunizations against a person’s will or as a condition of employment. Two in the Tennessee Senate and two in the Tennessee House are identical across the chambers. Senator Janice Bowling (R-District 16) introduced the Senate bills. “There should not be any coercion on anybody’s part to force someone to submit to any kind of medical procedure that they don’t want,” Bowling said.

Chris Stuckmann reviews Wonder Woman 1984, starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, Robin Wright, Connie Nielsen. Directed by Patty Jenkins.