W.E. “Bubber” Wilkes spent 30 years raising turkeys and then beef cattle, 24 years on the Oconee County Commission, and five years working security at Athens Regional Hospital. And January will mark his first year on home dialysis for kidney failure. Wilkes was born with only one kidney, but it was larger than normal and functioned…
It’s never a good sign when you start urinating blood. It was 2010, Sara Lewis was 12, and she assumed she had started her period. But what she initially thought was menstrual blood turned out to be something ominous — a sign that her kidneys were failing. At first, the doctors weren’t sure why the…
This is the ninth in a series of articles about health care in Southwest Georgia, an area of the state that has great health needs and challenges, but also some innovative approaches to such problems. The series is the product of a collaboration between Georgia Health News and the health and medical journalism graduate program at UGA…
Craig Washington likes to quote a scene in the Meryl Streep movie “Marvin’s Room” when he talks about slowing the spread of HIV. Streep’s character tells her son that her feelings for him are “like a big bowl of fish hooks,” meaning they’re jumbled together and can’t be separated. When it comes to containing HIV, the…
When actor Charlie Sheen went public with his HIV status late last year, Cathryn Lapka hoped his announcement would ignite a 21st century conversation about HIV – and its prevention – in America. But she was disappointed. Sheen was already notorious for his reckless, bizarre behavior, which he now admits was tied to drug use….
Law enforcement officers in the South made 445,928 drug arrests in 2014. Georgia is keeping pace with its neighbors, with more than 42,000 drug arrests in that period, but it’s taking a markedly more compassionate stance than neighboring states when the drug user is a pregnant woman. Four years ago, Georgia lawmakers rejected a bill…