Star Tribune
New frostbite drug could save Minnesota lives and limbs
Great news for Minnesota lives and limbs this snowy week.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration just approved a treatment – the very first — for severe frostbite. The drug, iloprost, could save the fingers and toes of adults at risk of amputation.
Every year, the Minnesota Department of Health tracks the health toll of extreme cold. Frostbite sends hundreds of Minnesotans to the hospital each year, even in a relatively mild winter like this one.
In frigid 2022, trips to the emergency room and hospitalizations for frostbite soared — 1,055 cases of superficial frostbite and 114 cases of severe frostbite with tissue necrosis. Last year, frostbite hospitalizations dropped by almost half, to 503 superficial cases and 70 severe frostbite injuries.
Frost bites in stages. Starting with frostnip that pinks your ears and cheeks and stings like crazy when you step inside and realize just how cold you got while sledding or shoveling or walking the dog.
Then there’s the burning and blistering of superficial frostbite that leaves your skin mottled, stinging and swollen.
Severe frostbite — may none of us get closer to it than Mayo Clinic’s frostbite resource page — ravages the skin and the tissues beneath. Extremities go numb and turn white or bluish gray. As the damage cuts off circulation, dying tissue hardens and turns black.
This is where the new treatment comes in.
For the drug study, researchers gave patients with severe frostbite an intravenous infusion of iloprost – a hypertension drug that opens blood vessels and prevents clotting – for up to six hours a day for up to seven days.
After a week, a bone scan found that none of the 16 patients who received iloprost were at risk of an amputation. Meanwhile, 60% of the patients in the control group lost fingers or toes.
The results were so promising that federal regulators gave the treatment priority review and fast-tracked it through the Orphan Drug program. It could be available as early as this spring under the brand name Aurlumyn. Drug maker Eicos Sciences has not yet set a price.
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
