![]() In our part of North Carolina and in other parts of the east there are still places where people can go out and enjoy themselves with very little risk of encountering a tick and even less risk of being exposed to a TBD. ![]() To the east, other diseases like Ehrlichiosis are on the rise as well.įortunately, this doesn’t mean they are a problem everywhere. To the north, including in North Carolina along the Virginia border, Lyme Disease is increasing. Ticks, and tickborne diseases (TBDs), are spreading and becoming more common in the eastern United States. Is there something different about the environment here that makes it less tick-friendly? Identifying that difference may help us address tick overabundance in other regions.Īre the rates of tickborne diseases (TBD) accordingly low too? If we can identify why that’s happening here, it might help us understand why ticks are becoming such a problem elsewhere. So why aren’t they established and abundant here? I think that is a bit of a surprise. Because they ride on deer (and pets and people) ticks can move around pretty well. We have plenty of deer and other hosts, and we have lots of apparently suitable habitat. This is shaping up to be a bit of a mystery ticks are becoming a pretty big problem (both as a nuisance and a public health threat) in many parts of the east, but for some reason not right around here.įor example, there’s no clear reason why our deer tick numbers are so low we did not find a single adult deer tick in our sampling. “So, we have a few doctors who will go to the home and provide the care at home.Your study shows that the tick population around our part of the North Carolina piedmont is low- which runs counter to predictions. “People that are homebound can no longer go to their primary care physician,” she said. She said Kaiser also has a primary care program for homebound seniors in both Petaluma and Marin County. Giving primary care doctors the “basic tools” to care for older adults with fewer medical needs will give geriatricians the time needed to care for seniors with more complex medical needs, she said.Ĭanio helped set up geriatric evaluation and management clinics for Kaiser Permanente in San Rafael and Santa Rosa for people with conditions that may be difficult for primary care physicians to address, such as elder frailty and dementia. ![]() “How can I serve more people knowing that there's not enough of us,” Canio said, adding that one solution is providing more training to primary care doctors so they can more easily and confidently identify geriatric syndromes. Sonoma County, she said, probably has less than 10 geriatricians. “As we are usually physicians and not geriatricians, our focus is on treating diseases one by one,” Canio said, adding that when clinical trials for various medications likely “excluded a lot of these multi-complexity, multi-morbidities that we’re having to see in people as we get older.”Ĭanio, who is on the local steering committee for the county’s Master Plan for Aging, a blueprint for addressing the state’s rapidly changing demographics, said there are roughly 800 board certified geriatricians in California and 7,000 in the nation.Ĭanio said one geriatrician is able to adequately care for only about 800 seniors. Wynnelena Canio, a geriatrician and psychiatrist for Kaiser Permanente, said more consideration needs to go into “all the interactions” of so many medications. Paul Dunaway, director of the county’s adult and aging division of the Human Services Department, said the county has embarked on a multiyear effort to develop a local Strategic Aging Plan that will align with the state’s 2021 Master Plan for Aging.ĭr. Some older residents face a chronic illnesses and are prescribed up to 20 medications from different physicians, Carlson said. The clinic is an alternative to the rapid, assembly line model of medical care that yields only “15 minutes“ with a doctor, she said. Grove by Sutter, located on Summerfield Road in East Santa Rosa, offers a team-based model of care that includes a physician, an advanced nurse or nurse practitioner, a social worker and a medical care coordinator. And yet our system has not transformed to that person yet.” “It turns out the normal person in the health system is now somebody in their 70s and 80s. “We used to talk about it in medical school, the 40-year-old man is the norm,” she said. Carlson, who created and led the Santa Rosa clinic when it was still a pilot, said the modern health care model caters toward a much younger population. Charlotte Carlson, a geriatrician with Sutter Pacific Medical Foundation.Ĭarlson founded Grove at Sutter, a geriatric primary care clinic operated by Sutter in Santa Rosa and San Mateo. Such a rapidly aging population has the potential to severely burden local health care systems, said Dr.
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