Home Care In Boyce, LA

Ross Boyce MD, MSc, partners with Western Carolina University and Mission Hospital to lay the foundation for effective patient care, prevention and public health awareness–funded by the State of North Carolina through the N.C. Collaboratory.

In September of 2022, a 10-year-old in Brevard, North Carolina, complained of intense headaches, chills, fever, and extreme fatigue. Her mother Bailey Kavanagh thought it was probably something her daughter picked up at school. Three days later when nothing was working for the pain, the child was treated for Strep A at the local emergency room. But Kavanagh knew something wasn’t right when her daughter started vomiting. She turned to her pediatrician for answers, who reviewed test results and wrote on paper, instead of speaking out loud, she’s “probably going to Mission.” Kavanagh knew the situation must be serious to be transferred to Mission Hospital in Asheville, an hour away. In an October 2022 podcast chronicling her daughter’s frightening illness, she revealed that the “unofficial” diagnosis was La Crosse Encephalitis, a relatively uncommon disease that can cause brain swelling as well as long-term neurological disability, caused by the bite of an infected mosquito.

Ross Boyce, MD, MSc, a researcher with the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases at the UNC School of Medicine, studies La Crosse and other vector-borne diseases, including malaria in the highlands of western Uganda. He says when it comes to prevention and control, malaria and La Crosse have a lot in common. In rural Uganda, where transportation options are limited, getting patients to the clinic is the hardest part. Once there, effective diagnostics and treatment are available. That’s not the case for La Crosse.

“There is no vaccine, no good diagnostic testing options, and no anti-viral treatment for La Crosse. So, I would consider it in the realm of neglected tropical diseases, where Western North Carolina, along with Ohio, probably bears the highest burden of virus,” Boyce said.

La Crosse is usually acquired through the bite of the Eastern treehole mosquito (Aedes triseriatus). It was first identified in 1960, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, but Boyce says the highest concentrations of the disease today are seen in Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, West Virginia, and Ohio, with the bulk of the disease occurring in the Appalachian range where dense hardwoods are found. Symptoms, which can occur anywhere from a few days to weeks after being bitten by the infected mosquito, include fever, nausea, vomiting, and in more severe cases convulsions, tremors and even coma. Younger children are by far the most susceptible to severe disease and often suffer long-term neurological and cognitive difficulties. Because adults may have milder symptoms, many of these cases are not identified and go largely unreported.

“It’s odd to think of this seemingly exotic, yet little known mosquito-borne virus that primarily impacts kids being so potentially life altering. The long-term sequelae of La Crosse infection can contribute to poor academic performance, impaired physical functioning and behavioral problems. And it happens in these really rural counties of western North Carolina. Every time I talk about La Crosse, people – including many physicians – are surprised to learn this is happening essentially in our own backyard.”

But every summer, Brian Byrd, PhD, an environmental health professor at Western Carolina University does think about it, and so do his students, in an active undergraduate research program that has shown the virus is a persistent threat to North Carolina.

When a child gets sick, Byrd gets a call from the health department or hospital. He goes to the family’s house to look for evidence of the treehole mosquito, using molecular tools to identify them. He also tries to address any problems he sees, like containers with rain water, or anything that can hold water.

“We’re working under the hypothesis that the risk may persist at house, because what we’ve found through our epidemiology records with the State and CDC, is that in some cases, kids are getting sick at the same time and going to the hospital the same week,” Byrd said. “At other times, a kid gets sick and then three years later, a sibling gets sick, while living at the same house.”

“There’s also evidence to suggest the risk may persist from year-to-year. For example, a child is sick and the family moves away. Then, a new family moves in and another child gets sick at the same house. We think this is linked to the biology of this virus, because the virus is passed from mosquito to the next generation of mosquito in the eggs.”

Boyce met Byrd through the Vector-Borne Disease Epidemiology, Ecology, and Response Hub (VEER), a multi-disciplinary research collaboration that Boyce established to study tick- and mosquito-borne diseases endemic to North Carolina.

Last year, the two formed a novel collaboration, funded by the N. C. Collaboratory, which will lay the foundation for an effective patient care and prevention effort.

Jeffrey Warren, PhD, executive director of the N.C. Collaboratory says Boyce piqued interest when he showed that North Carolina, predominantly the Appalachian region, is one of the largest hotspots in the nation for the mosquito-borne virus.

“When Dr. Boyce suggested a joint partnership with Western Carolina University, we immediately knew this was an issue worth funding, in service to the people of our State,” Warren said.

Now just months into the three-year pilot project, the team is working with the CDC to collect and test collected mosquito samples that will advance the development and validation of new diagnostic tools. At the state level, they’re working with the N.C. Communicable Disease Branch at the Division of Public Health, to identify and record La Crosse cases, while at the same time building out a cohort of patients enrolled through a new partnership with the Department of Pediatrics at Mission Hospital to better characterize the clinical illness and identify best practices. Together Byrd and Boyce hope this effort will lead to improved prevention and control programs that can be adopted by local health departments, clinics, and hospitals.

“I think we do a good job with the vector side of it, and to some degree, the epidemiology, but one of our challenges has been not having the infectious disease expertise in Western North Carolina that UNC has,” explained Byrd.

“In my experience, which is more than 15 years, it’s very rare for a family member to know about La Crosse before a child gets sick. We need to get a better handle on these environmental variables, and we need to make sure people know it’s a problem, because it’s not going away.”

Bailey Kavanagh concluded her podcast with news that her daughter, back at school, was recovering with lingering symptoms. She also added that local health officials would be visiting her property to learn more, to try and help prevent other children from contracting the virus.

Learn more about Dr. Byrd’s research: Watch here (approximate timestamp 6:00).

About the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases

The Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases (IGHID) at the UNC School of Medicine is an engine for global health research and pan-university collaboration, transforming health in North Carolina and around the world. As the PI’s comprehensive partner, IGHID facilitates research excellence while providing opportunities for investigators to nurture emerging scientists through training and service, to achieve positive patient care outcomes and sustainable practice.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present Long Distance, a solo exhibition of new work by Martin Boyce, on view in Los Angeles from September 17 - October 29, 2022. This will be Boyce’s fifth solo exhibition with Tanya Bonakdar; his first at the Los Angeles gallery.

Martin Boyce’s sculptures, photographs and installations poetically investigate the intersections between art, architecture, design, and nature. Since the beginning of his career, he has incorporated a palette of shapes and forms that frequently recall familiar structures from the built environment – a phone booth, a chain-linked fence, a ventilation grill, to name a few – yet presents them in a way that is entirely new. Collapsing distinctions between past, present, and future, Boyce’s works seem to exist in their own autonomous world, untethered to any fixed time or place.

In Long Distance, five painted wall panels and a mobile act as the location for a series of analog telephones. Drawing inspiration from cinema and literature, Boyce explores the telephone and its relationship to drama and location. Through a multitude of area codes and time zones it allows our voice to, almost supernaturally, appear somewhere else, to be in two places at once. It can be a passive medium or an intimate co-conspirator. Its presence alone introduces the potential for drama, ‘an object through which fate comes to call’ (An Elegy for the Landline in Literature, Sophie Haigney).

In these new phone panels, the ‘canvas’ is made of perforated steel, painted and over-painted to create a rich, textured backdrop with layers of color and shade. Appearing solid from a distance, the perforations only become apparent as one gets closer, as if the surface itself is only partially present. The design of the telephones incorporate a lexicon of shapes and motifs that appear throughout Boyce’s work. The curved shapes, which find their origins in the new pattern of the ventilation grill sculptures, have freed themselves to become physical compositional elements within the paintings. The telephones occupy this painted space, these porous walls, perhaps awaiting future calls from their own impending obsolescence.

In the installation Place On Hold, Boyce explores the cinematic image of a chair being used to wedge a door closed. As the writer George Perec noted in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, any door “breaks space in two, splits it, prevents osmosis, imposes a partition. On one side, me and my place, the private, the domestic…on the other side, other people, the world, the public, politics.”

In light of the dramatic shifts in world politics over the last few years, Boyce felt compelled to revisit his 1999 work Chair (Noir), which was designed with an adjustable backrest that could extend to meet the underside of a door, creating a wedge. It functions not to provide comfort but instead to barricade oneself in and to keep the world out. In contrast to the utopian project of modernism, it is a device for inculcating and amplifying paranoia, a mental state that pervades the current political conditions of contested borders, mass migration, and fear-based isolationist ideologies.

In Place on Hold, we see from the chair itself and the corresponding Drawing LD / CH01 that it is an intentional, fabricated device rather than an innocent object whose new use has been improvised. The chair’s protective nature and paranoid tendencies are built in rather than adopted. Like players within a stage set or characters in a film, the telephones, the chair and the door are protagonists of the exhibition – there is a silent expectation that at any moment these portals could introduce a welcome visit or an unexpected intrusion. While the telephones represent the possibility of connectivity, the chairwants to prevent contact and keep the world out. It tentatively lodges us in a perpetual present, a frozen now that keeps us from the linearity of the past, present and future.

Thresholds, conduits, and portals reoccur throughout Boyce’s work. Gates, fences, doors, vents, and more recently the telephones are all objects that delineate boundaries between one place and another. In the installation Place On Hold, a set of vents introduces a new repeat pattern, which expands upon the artist’s earlier Concrete Tree pattern. The new curved motif finds itself in a face-off with the older, more angular pattern embedded within every detail of the door. The chair wedges the door firmly closed, but layers of porous thresholds permeate the scene. The vents of the bronze grill that partially covers an aperture in the door and the keyhole all allow minuscule moments of seepage. In Los Angeles the architecture of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler attempted to blur the distinctions of inside and out. Place on Hold taps into a similar set of conditions. The interiority of the chair and door is reinforced by the vents, but the leaves create a dreamlike uncertainty. Suddenly we are outside but are we barricaded in or out?

Winner of the Tate’s 2011 Turner Prize, Boyce was born in Hamilton, Scotland in 1967 and currently lives and works in Glasgow. He attended the Glasgow School of Art, where he received a BA in Environmental Art in 1990 and an MFA in 1997. In 1996, he also studied at California Institute for the Arts in Valencia, CA.

In 2009, Boyce represented Scotland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with a solo pavilion presentation entitled No Reflections, which traveled to Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland from 2009 to 2010. Recent selected exhibitions include: On the Other Hand, Canary Wharf Estate, London (2021); MONO, Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow (2021); Recurring Dreams, Haubrok Foundation, Berlin (2021); Just Beyond the Undertow, CONVENT Space for Contemporary Art, Ghent (2019); An Inn For Phantoms Of The Outside And In, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute (2019); Hanging Gardens, A4 Art Museum, Chengdu (2018); Spotlight – Do Words Have Voices, Tate Britain, London (2016); Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel, Basel (2015); and When Now is Night, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (2015).

Boyce’s work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate in London, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, and Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, among other institutions worldwide.

All installation images above: Photo by Jeff McLane

BOYCE, La. (KALB) - The Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office arrested a Boyce man for 25 counts of pornography involving juveniles.

RPSO shared that the investigation began on April 9 when deputies learned of a complaint of a non-consensual disclosure of a private image. The suspect was identified as John Thomas Rougeou, 54, of Boyce, who is also a local photographer. Multiple sources who work with the Louisiana High School Athletic Association have confirmed to KALB that Rougeou is also a current official for basketball, baseball and softball games in the area.

During a search, detectives found various electronic items that were seized for forensic processing. They found multiple images of child pornography and obtained an arrest warrant for Rougeou.

Rougeou was located during a traffic stop on May 8 and was taken into custody without incident. He was arrested and booked into the Rapides Parish Detention Center for 25 counts of pornography involving juveniles. He was released on May 9 on a $50,000 bond.

Detectives say this is still an ongoing investigation and if anyone has any further information, they are asked to contact Detective Matthew Cross at 318-473-6727.

Background information:

On January 23, 2001, Rougeou was indicted on a count of pornography with juveniles and two counts of indecent behavior with a juvenile.

The pornography charge was tied to a September 5, 2000, accusation in which he was accused of possessing visual reproductions of sexual performances involving a child under the age of 17.

The indecent behavior charges were tied to accusations between August 31, 1999, and September 13, 1999, when Rougeou was accused of committing a lewd and lascivious act in the presence of a child.

The District Attorney’s Office dismissed the pornography charge on December 17, 2001, but Rougeou entered a plea of no contest to two felony charges of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile in lieu of the indecent behavior charges.

Rougeou was represented by Camille Giordano. Assistant District Attorney T. Gerald Henderson prosecuted the case. Judge Harry Randow sentenced Rougeou to pay a fine and court costs, but that sentence was suspended under article 893, which allows the imposition of a sentence for a first-time non-violent felony conviction to be set aside. Instead, Rougeou was placed on supervised probation.

We have also learned from the Rapides Parish School Board that Rougeou was hired as a teacher at Acadian 6th Grade Center back on Aug. 15, 1996. He was transferred to Rosenthal Montessori for the 1997-1998 school year. He resigned on Dec. 18, 2001, and has not been employed with the Rapides Parish school system for more than 20 years.

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