NC MedAssist: Dispensing Hope throughout North Carolina.

By providing free medications to those who are uninsured and who have low income, organizations like NC MedAssist are able alleviate this barrier for thousands of North Carolinians each year. This article will describe the history and benefits of NC MedAssist.

Dead molluscan shells from multiple trophic groups as archives of nitrogen isotopic evidence of wastewater gradients in estuaries.

Increased coastal urbanization worldwide has resulted in increased nitrogen inputs to ecosystems, leading to eutrophication and other negative effects. We assessed δN in the dead-collected shells of three molluscan species in two estuaries in order to evaluate their ability to identify known gradients in wastewater nitrogen input, namely from private septic systems feeding directly into Waquoit Bay and from a groundwater plume reflecting wastewater injection at a municipal treatment plant in West Falmouth Harbor, Massachusetts, USA. Shells of a suspension-feeder (Geukensia demissa), a micro-algal grazer (Littorina littorea), and an omnivore (Nassarius obsoletus) were collected from lower intertidal sediments near the taxon's life habitat.

Prevalence of ICU Delirium in Postoperative Pediatric Cardiac Surgery Patients.

Objectives: The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of ICU delirium in children less than 18 years old that underwent cardiac surgery within the last 30 days. The secondary aim of the study was to identify risk factors associated with ICU delirium in postoperative pediatric cardiac surgical patients.

Design: A 1-day, multicenter point-prevalence study of delirium in pediatric postoperative cardiac surgery patients.

Nineteenth-century collapse of a benthic marine ecosystem on the open continental shelf.

The soft-sediment seafloor of the open continental shelf is among the least-known biomes on Earth, despite its high diversity and importance to fisheries and biogeochemical cycling. Abundant dead shells of epifaunal suspension-feeding terebratulid brachiopods () and scallops on the now-muddy mainland continental shelf of southern California reveal the recent, previously unsuspected extirpation of an extensive offshore shell-gravel ecosystem, evidently driven by anthropogenic siltation. Living populations of attached epifauna, which formerly existed in a middle- and outer-shelf mosaic with patches of trophically diverse muds, are restricted today to rocky seafloor along the shelf edge and to the sandier shelves of offshore islands.

Detecting, sourcing, and age-dating dredged sediments on the open shelf, southern California, using dead mollusk shells.

Molluscan shell debris is an under-exploited means of detecting, sourcing, and age-dating dredged sediments in open-shelf settings. Backscatter features on the Southern California shelf are suggestive of dredged sediment hauled from San Diego Bay but deposited significantly inshore of the EPA-designated ocean disposal site. We find that 36% of all identifiable bivalve shells >2mm (44% of shells >4mm) in sediment samples from this 'short dump' area are from species known to live exclusively in the Bay; such shells are absent at reference sites of comparable water depth, indicating that their presence in the short-dump area signals non-compliant disposal rather than natural offshore transport or sea level rise.