June 21, 2005

Carolina in the News

Here is a sampling of links and notes about Carolina
people and programs cited recently in the media:

International Coverage

American students join Vietnam youth volunteer campaign
Thanh Nien News (Vietnam)
The Ho Chi Minh City Youth Union yesterday welcomed a group of American students to participate in Vietnam's Green Summer 2005 youth volunteer campaign in HCMC and the Mekong Delta province of Ben Tre. The group of twelve members came from University of North Carolina in the US under the American program, Robertson Green Summer.

Regional Coverage

Runaway Eating
KYW-TV (CBS Affiliate, Philadelphia)
Medical Reporter Stephanie Stahl reports that a newly defined eating disorder is striking millions of people, mostly women, who are obsessed about food, exercising, and how they look....Taylor and eating disorder expert Cynthia Bulik, (professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), wrote a book called "Runaway Eating." They say there is a difference between healthy dieting and being a runaway eater.
UNC News Release: http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jan05/bulik011805.html

Wisdom teeth: To pull or not to pull is question
Daytona Beach News Journal (Fla.)
In his more than 35 years of practicing dentistry, Dr. Norman Chamberlain has seen the good, the bad and the ugly of wisdom teeth.... continuing study at the University of North Carolina uncovered several interesting facts about the relationship of intact wisdom teeth and chronic decay and periodontal disease. Dental school researchers are monitoring 330 people, ages 20 to 29, all with intact wisdom teeth.:*Dr. Raymond P. White Jr., project director, and his team found early-stage periodontal (gum) disease in one-third of the study subjects, 25 to 29. The highest concentrations of periodontal bacteria were found in gum tissue surrounding the wisdom teeth.

State & Local Coverage

Panelists decry lack of illness prevention
The Herald-Sun (Durham)
America's health care system does a pretty good job of treating illness, but preventing sickness before it starts is another matter entirely, panelists representing a number of minority groups agreed Monday....Grant was among six panelists who gathered for an annual videoconference run by UNC's School of Public Health.
UNC News Release: http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jun05/minhealth05061505.html

Residents share plight with visitors
The Fayetteville Observer
Residents of poor, black communities near this golfing village (Pinehurst) are inviting U.S. Open visitors to tour their neighborhoods....Recently, however, town officials have been more willing to listen, said Anita Earls, director of advocacy at the Civil Rights Center, part of the University of North Carolina's law school in Chapel Hill. Earls has been helping to organize the three communities.

Conference to address improving health care for people with disabilities
The Asheville Citizen-Times
The Mountain Area Health Education Center will finish a 12-month initiative aimed at reducing health-care disparities for people with developmental disabilities with a conference this week addressing how to improve care for such individuals....Co-directors of the initiative, Dr. Adrian Sandler, medical director of the Olson Huff Center for Child Development in Asheville, and J. Gregory Olley, associate director of the Center for Learning and Development at UNC-Chapel Hill, invited a range of experts in the field of developmental medicine to speak at the conference.

Week in review
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
Liquidia Technologies is flying the coop. The company, which employs six, is swapping its digs on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill for 5,000 square feet of space at Durham's Keystone Office Park. It is using a portion of the $2.5 million raised from investors to finance the move. It also will hire 10 chemists during the next year....Liquidia is the second Triangle startup based on technology developed by Joseph M. DeSimone, a professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University.
UNC News Release: http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jun05/Desimone6062105.htm

Closed eatery turning blue
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
They're not repainting, but the owners of the long-dormant Wicked Burrito on Franklin Street are going Carolina Blue....The Lone Star Steakhouse & Saloon Inc., which has let the multihued Mexican restaurant sit idle for five years, is expected to announce today that it's letting CarolinaPros Inc., a community service organization founded by former UNC-Chapel Hill basketball players Rick Fox and King Rice, move in temporarily.

Mecklenburg official warns of tax hikes
The Charlotte Observer
Mecklenburg County commissioners will discuss tonight whether the county should borrow $554 million for construction projects -- and how the county would pay off the debt....Jack Vogt, a professor of public finance and government at UNC Chapel Hill, said maintaining that bond rating should be the county's highest priority.

Choosing sides is easy in Burma (Opinion-editorial column)
The Herald-Sun (Durham)
The Burmese Nobel prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, turned 60 on Sunday. There was only muted celebration in her tropical lakeside house in Rangoon, as the day was much like thousands of other days. Suu Kyi, a pro-democracy leader, has been under house arrest for the majority of the last 16 years....Andrew Reynolds is an associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been an adviser on constitutional design issues in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan, among other countries.

Co-author shocked by data falsification
The Herald-Sun (Durham)
Priscilla Cooper had been friends with Steven Leadon for years, going back to when the two worked together in California....Leadon was a UNC radiobiologist when the scholarly article ran in a 1997. He left UNC in 2003, around the time the first of two article retractions would appear in Science, a prestigious academic journal.

State & Local Note

State Government Radio
State Government Radio featured Vic Schoenbach, associate professor in Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Public Health, to discuss the Health Disparities videoconference. State Government Radio covers the news of state government and the business of state government in North Carolina. The program aired on the Local Government Report segment at 8:38 p.m Tuesday.

Issues & Trends

Chapel Hill projects stuck on 'do nots'
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
They don't really know what they want, but Town Council members surely know what they don't want when it comes to designing two downtown redevelopment projects....It wants something looking to the future in a place that for many -- UNC-Chapel Hill alumni, in particular -- is memory lane.

Triangle's biotechs ranked 5th in study
The News & Observer (Raleigh)
The Triangle has the nation's fastest-growing work force in the life-sciences industries, and the best success rate for bringing biotechnology research ideas to market, a study released Monday showed....Overall, the Triangle ranked fifth behind traditional life-sciences hot spots Boston, Philadelphia, New York and the San Francisco Bay area. It beat regions such as San Diego, Seattle and Chicago.

Town taps 3 firms for $40M project
The Herald-Sun (Durham)
The Town Council decided Monday on who will build the town's largest-ever capital project on Millhouse Road....The town expects to have the new operations center in northern Chapel Hill ready by the end of 2006. That date corresponds with the end of the town's lease on the current site of the Public Works and Transportation facilities, on land owned by UNC Chapel Hill.

Economic development board hires director
The Chapel Hill Herald
The town's economic development board has hired a Chapel Hill native with more than 20 years experience in downtown revitalization as its executive director....The town and UNC set up the corporation last summer to promote, maintain and revitalize downtown.
Related Link: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/orange/chapel_hill/story/2521489p-8925852c.html

Produced by News Services, Carolina in the News is an e-mail sampling of current news media coverage about Carolina people and programs, as well as issues and trends that affect the university. Stories usually will be online and available free for a limited time - often one to two weeks. Expiration dates before stories move to archives vary by media outlet. Some outlets require free user registration or a subscription.

Carolina in the News is also posted daily to the News Services Web page, http://www.unc.edu/news/clips/index.shtml.

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