News from the South - Louisiana News Feed
Facetime 911 During an Emergency
SUMMARY: iPhone 14 and later models now allow users to FaceTime 911 during emergencies, providing a video stream to first responders. This upgrade aims to deliver critical, real-time information when individuals may be unable to communicate due to injury or distress. The feature enhances the ability of emergency services to assess situations quickly. For more stories and updates, visit WWL Plus.
📲🚨 New iPhone update alert! You can now FaceTime 911 in emergencies. Dispatchers will be able to see live video and even record what they’re seeing.
News from the South - Louisiana News Feed
An aspiring Louisiana pilot can’t fly with sickle cell disease, so he’s editing his genes
by Halle Parker, Verite, Louisiana Illuminator
August 3, 2025
NEW ORLEANS – Daniel Cressy yawned, tired after three days of watching a machine pull blood out of his body, extract his stem cells and pump the blood back in. Tubes protruded from the side of his neck, preventing him from turning his head. He gestured toward them while sitting in his hospital bed at the Manning Family Children’s Hospital.
“It’s uncomfortable at first, but then you kind of get used to it,” he said Wednesday.
The tubes were annoying, but, to Cressy, the reward is more than worth the discomfort: freedom from sickle cell disease. This procedure marked the first major step toward what he hopes is a long-lasting cure for the rare genetic blood disorder.
Over the next year and a half, Cressy’s genes will be altered to remove the trait that causes his red blood cells to sickle, or harden and bend in a way that blocks blood flow and causes immense pain. He will be the first patient in Louisiana to complete the gene therapy treatment.
The 22-year-old’s stem cells will be sent to a lab in Scotland where they will be treated with an enzyme to reach a specific part of the cells and edit the gene to stop his blood cells from changing shape. Then, Cressy’s edited stem cells will be returned to Louisiana and infused back into his body. More than 90% of the patients in a clinical trial who received this treatment known as Casgevy, went at least a year without sickled cells blocking blood flow.
The process is long and expensive. Between insurance approvals, paperwork and preliminary doctor appointments, it took Cressy nearly a year to get to this room. But, for Cressy, it’s the only way to achieve his dream of becoming a commercial pilot.
Three years ago, Cressy discovered his love of flying, but after hours of lessons, working toward his certification, he was told his dream might be impossible. People with sickle cell disease seeking a pilot’s license face scrutiny over their health backgrounds from the Federal Aviation Administration.
High altitudes can make cells more likely to sickle, creating the risk of intense pain while in the air if there isn’t enough oxygen.
“The Office of Aerospace Medicine routinely reviews evolving medical therapies and updates policies when there is proof that new treatments are safe in the aviation environment,” said an FAA spokesperson in a statement.
Cressy applied for his medical certification in 2022 but was rejected despite several appeals. To Cressy, his condition was manageable. Unlike many people with severe cases of sickle cell disease, he hasn’t needed frequent hospital visits and blood transfusions to avoid pain.
“One thing that people don’t understand is that sickle cell affects everybody differently,” he said. “I believed that I could fly without getting cured.” But the FAA disagreed.
When Cressy first asked for the treatment, his hematologist, Dr. Zach LeBlanc, said no. To LeBlanc, a career in aviation didn’t seem like a top medical priority. But Cressy’s passion – and an official rejection from the FAA – changed LeBlanc’s mind.
“The more I got to know him, I understood that it wasn’t as superficial as it appeared the first time,” said LeBlanc, a pediatric hematologist with the hospital who was part of clinical trials to develop another long-term sickle cell cure. “He was really serious about this, and he understood the risk.”
Traditionally, bone marrow transplants have been the primary way to provide long-lasting relief, but patients have to fit specific criteria and find an unrelated donor with a close genetic match. The right bone marrow donor is hard to find, and Cressy didn’t have many options for a cure until two gene therapies were approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2023. Children’s Hospital is the first in the state to be approved to administer the treatments.
Cressy and LeBlanc hope other sickle cell patients will soon receive better care. The Louisiana Department of Health recently estimated that at least 3,000 people in the state have been diagnosed with sickle cell anemia.
The disorder occurs mostly in Black people like Cressy. It’s caused by a genetic mutation that evolved and spread across much of Africa as a response to malaria. People who only have one sickle cell gene are at least 90% more resistant to malaria, but if a person inherits two sickle cell genes, they will develop the painful disorder.
Many health care providers and researchers, including LeBlanc, now acknowledge how the medical community has historically neglected and stigmatized patients with the disorder. But LeBlanc believes, especially with the addition of new treatments at Children’s Hospital, that such care is starting to improve.
“Sickle cell disease in the state of Louisiana is hopefully in a time where it can really change,” he said.
There are still vast areas in rural parts of the state where basic care for sickle cell isn’t available, especially for adults, but there’s been an uptick in attention, he said.
Advocates for people living with the disorder say that attention is much needed. Courtney Davis is the deputy executive director of the Sickle Cell Association of South Louisiana. He said the state legislature has begun to pay more attention to the disorder, forming a commission and starting a registry to monitor the prevalence of the condition in 2021.
“There’s a lack of knowledge about sickle cell,” said Davis, who is also living with sickle cell disease. “We’re always trying to garner more support for sickle cell all over the state.”
Compared to other rare disorders like cystic fibrosis, there’s a large disparity in both public and private funding for sickle cell treatments and cures, researchers have found. Disparities in health care for Black Americans also affect how patients are treated.
Rhonda Chube, a community health worker with the Sickle Cell Association of South Louisiana, said her clients often face stigma when trying to receive care. They struggle to get hospitals and employers to understand the severity of their pain, she said.
“They may look okay physically, but what’s going on inside their body is where the problem is,” she said.
The condition also comes with financial burden due to hospitalizations, transfusions and regular doctor appointments. Chube and Davis said it’s nearly impossible to survive the disorder without insurance.
Many patients also need insurance in order to afford a curative treatment like Cressy’s. The medication alone costs $2 to $3 million. The stem cell collection and infusion, among other doctor visits, add another few hundred thousand dollars.
Lynn Winfield, Manning Family Children’s Hospital’s senior director of patient care services, said it can take more than a year for private insurance providers to approve reimbursement for the procedures. Without that guarantee, neither the patient nor medical providers can afford the treatment. Medicaid recipients are easier to get approved, but Winfield said she worried that could change with recent federal cuts to funding.
Winfield said the hospital is already lining up more patients, including a boy from Shreveport.
Cressy hopes he is only the beginning. He plans to advocate for more people with sickle cell as he goes through treatment and is excited to eventually become one of the first commercial pilots with the disorder. Cressy will be following in the footsteps of a friend with sickle cell who participated in a gene therapy clinical trial in Atlanta two years ago. They met through a Reddit post, bonding over experiencing the same roadblock to aviation. That friend, Cressy said, has since received a pilot’s license.
“Becoming aviators with sickle cell was once something that people thought was impossible,” he said from his hospital bed, wearing a Mr. Impossible t-shirt that he created. “My buddy has already proved to the world that it’s not. Nothing is impossible.”
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.
This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://veritenews.org/2025/08/01/louisiana-sickle-cell-disease-gene-therapy/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } }
Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.
The post An aspiring Louisiana pilot can’t fly with sickle cell disease, so he’s editing his genes appeared first on lailluminator.com
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
This article presents a human-interest story highlighting a medical breakthrough in gene therapy for sickle cell disease, focusing on both scientific progress and social issues surrounding healthcare access and racial disparities. It touches on underfunding of a disease predominantly affecting Black Americans, systemic healthcare inequities, and the challenges faced by patients navigating insurance and bureaucratic systems. The tone is largely empathetic and supportive of advancements in medical treatment and increased attention to historically neglected communities, aligning it with a center-left perspective that emphasizes social justice, healthcare improvement, and minority advocacy without veering into overt political partisanship.
News from the South - Louisiana News Feed
‘A gun to a knife fight’: Democrats’ leader pledges a pugnacious party in more states
by Jacob Fischler, Louisiana Illuminator
August 2, 2025
PORTLAND, Oregon — Democrats must be more aggressive organizers and campaigners to win back the working-class coalition they have increasingly lost to President Donald Trump, according to Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin.
Too often in recent decades, the party has ceded ground to Republicans, Martin told States Newsroom in a one-on-one July 31 interview during a stop on a visit to community groups, activists and fundraisers in Oregon.
Since 2009, the national party’s infrastructure has deteriorated, allowing the GOP to build organizational advantages across the country, define Democratic candidates before they can define themselves and put too many states out of reach, he said.
In sometimes more pugnacious terms than might be expected from someone with Martin’s clean-cut corporate look and Midwestern demeanor, he said his task as party leader is to reverse that trend.
“We’re not here to tie one of our hands behind our back,” Martin said. “In the past, I think our party would bring a pencil to a knife fight. We’re going to bring a gun to a knife fight.”
The knife-fight analogy was an answer to a question about how Democrats should respond to Texas Republicans redrawing congressional district lines as the GOP struggles to keep its slim U.S. House majority, but it could apply to other aspects of Martin’s vision for the party.
Martin, whom Democrats elected in February to lead them for the next four years, said Democrats should never turn off their messaging and campaigning apparatus, and work to build party infrastructure in regions, states and cities where they have not competed in decades.
Over 45 minutes, he invoked the late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, a liberal whose populist approach to campaigning and governing practically sanctified him among Democrats in Martin’s native Minnesota, several times and indicated Wellstone would be an effective model for Democrats in 2024 and beyond.
“I think what the American people are looking for is people who are going to stand up and fight for what they believe in,” he said. “People didn’t always agree with Paul Wellstone all the time, but they still voted for him. They said … ‘He’s not one of these finger-in-the-wind politicians. He’s standing up for what he believes, and I’m going to give him credit for it even if I don’t agree with him on a particular issue.’ They want authenticity.”
Texas redistricting
The day after Texas Republicans released a map of proposed new congressional districts in a rare mid-decade redistricting effort that could net them five more U.S. House seats, Martin implied he would support blue-state leaders who retaliated with their own maps to give Democrats an advantage — even as he disparaged the move by Republicans.
He called the redistricting effort “a craven power grab” by Trump and Republicans, accusing them of “trying to rig the system.”
“If they can’t win on their own merits, they’re going to cheat and steal,” he said. “That’s essentially what they’re doing right now.”
But, even as Martin condemned those moves, he said Democrats should feel empowered to respond in kind. “We can’t be the only party that’s playing by the rules,” he said.
Leading Democrats in California, New York and Illinois have openly explored the possibility of emergency redistricting if the proposed Texas map becomes final, even though the issue has raised the ire of some usual allies who support less partisan election infrastructure.
The national party would be “very involved” in challenging the Texas map, as well as working with governors seeking to change their own maps, Martin said.
Never stop campaigning
Martin brought up, unprompted, some of the challenges his party faces.
Twice as many voters had an unfavorable view of Democrats as a favorable one in a July Wall Street Journal survey that showed the party with only 33% of support.
Voters now see Republicans as the party of working-class voters and Democrats as representatives of the elite, Martin said. In the 2024 election, the party did worse with nearly every slice of the electorate other than college-educated voters and wealthy voters.
Martin noted Trump made historic inroads with some traditional Democratic constituencies, earning a higher share of Latino, Black, Asian and Pacific Islander, young and working-class voters in 2024 than any Republican candidate in years.
That result was part of an ongoing trend going back 20 years, Martin said, and represents an existential threat to the Democratic party.
“We lost ground with every part of our coalition,” he said. “If we continue to lose ground with working people in this country, with all of the other parts of our coalition, we’re toast. We’ve got to reverse course.”
Democrats’ slide with those constituencies is in part “a branding issue,” permitted by the party’s willingness to let Trump and other Republicans’ campaigning in off-years go unanswered and a lack of a positive message articulated to voters, said Martin.
“We didn’t start our campaign until the spring of 2024 — way too late,” he said. “I would argue that they had already defined us before we ever had a chance to define ourselves. That can never happen again. Never, ever, ever. So that means we have to be campaigning all the time, year-round. Year-round organizing, year-round communications. We never stop talking to voters. We never stop campaigning.”
‘We all do better’
That campaigning should be focused on a positive view of what Democrats offer voters and include an appeal to “the vast majority of Americans, not just the people at the top.”
“We have to fix our brand,” Martin said. “We have to give people a sense that we’re fighting for them. We have to stand up and fight with everything we have right now, not just against Donald Trump, but for something. We have to give people a positive vision of what their lives would look like with Democrats in charge.”
Democrats’ message should be about a rising tide lifting all boats, Martin said, quoting Wellstone, for whom Martin, 52, interned at the beginning of his career and still considers an inspiration.
“Remember Paul’s famous slogan: ‘We all do better when we all do better,’” he said. “That should be the slogan of the Democratic Party.”
He praised Zohran Mamdani, the winner of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, for running an energetic campaign that was focused on showing how he could improve New Yorkers’ lives.
That should include a policy focus on affordability, health care access and a government that works for people beyond the elite.
But even as Martin articulated the positive message he said Democrats should focus on, he slipped into slamming Trump and Republicans, saying the tax and spending cuts law Trump signed last month would take health care away from people. The law was among the least popular in decades, he noted.
There was room for both a positive campaigning and highlighting Republicans’ unpopularity when appropriate, said Martin.
“It’s a both/and,” he said. “Let’s tell folks what is happening and let’s tell folks what Democrats are going to do.”
Senate in reach?
The unpopularity of Republicans’ law, which is projected to cut more than $1 trillion over 10 years from Medicaid, food stamps and other programs while lowering taxes on high earners, gives Democrats an opening in a difficult cycle for U.S. Senate races, Martin said.
Democrats — who control 47 seats, including two independents, compared to 53 for Republicans, who also hold a tie-breaking vote in Vice President JD Vance — need to net four additional seats in next year’s elections to win the majority in the chamber, which Martin said was possible under the right circumstances.
That view is out of step with current projections, which show Democratic seats in Georgia and Michigan at least as likely to flip as Republican seats in North Carolina and Maine. Democrats would have to win all four of those most competitive races, plus two that would be further stretches, to gain a majority.
Beyond North Carolina and Maine, Martin said the map to Democrats’ regaining the Senate would go through traditionally red states.
Iowa, where incumbent Sen. Joni Ernst could be vulnerable, and Alaska, where former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola would be a strong challenger to incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan, could be Democrats’ 50th and 51st Senate seats, he said.
Or, if right-wing primary challengers defeat more establishment incumbents in Louisiana and Texas, those states could turn into pickup opportunities, he said — though Trump won both states easily, by more than 20 points in the former.
Growing the party, growing the map
To win next year and beyond, Democrats must unify, he said.
Elements of the party that would impose purity tests on others — whether that’s progressives excluding moderates or vice versa — make that harder, he said.
“I believe you win elections by addition, not subtraction,” he said. “You win by bringing in people, new voices, and growing your coalition.”
Martin also wants to grow the map and compete across the country, using a strategy pioneered by former DNC Chair Howard Dean, who was chair from 2005 to 2009.
When President Barack Obama’s political team took control of the party apparatus in 2009, it “completely eviscerated” the state party infrastructure Dean had built, Martin said.
Earlier this year, he announced an initiative to provide at least $1 million a month to all state parties. The goal is to expand the number of competitive states and districts, reversing a trend that has seen fewer presidential contests focused on fewer states.
“There’s no such thing as a perpetual red state or a perpetual blue state,” he said. Turning states from Republican strongholds to competitive, or from competitive to favoring Democrats — or even to maintain Democratic strength — takes investment of money and energy, he said.
“It’s critical, and it’s something I firmly believe in,” he said. I’ve seen for so many years our national party and other party committees not making the investments to actually call themselves a national party,” he said. “You can’t be a national party if you’re just competing in seven states.”
Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.
The post ‘A gun to a knife fight’: Democrats’ leader pledges a pugnacious party in more states appeared first on lailluminator.com
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning
This content reflects a clear Democratic Party perspective, presenting Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin’s views on party strategy and challenges. The language is supportive of Democratic goals and critical of Republican tactics, particularly around redistricting and policy impacts. The tone favors Democratic messaging focused on working-class voters, inclusion, and opposition to Republican policies. While it reports Martin’s statements and positions directly, the framing and choice of quotes emphasize Democratic critiques and ambitions, indicating a left-leaning slant aligned with mainstream Democratic priorities and rhetoric.
News from the South - Louisiana News Feed
State auditor rebukes Guillory admin for spoil banks project
SUMMARY: A draft audit by the Louisiana legislative auditor criticizes Lafayette Consolidated Government (LCG) for secretly removing spoil banks in St. Martin Parish in 2022 without proper permits, neighboring parish consent, or public bidding, violating federal, state, and local laws. The $3.7 million flood-control project, defended by former Mayor-President Josh Guillory, faced multiple lawsuits and was linked to poor financial stewardship and legal risks. Despite internal and independent audits flagging numerous deficiencies, including permit failures and overpayments, Guillory labeled the investigation politically motivated. The ongoing fallout includes withheld state funding and fired project engineers, with legal and financial repercussions continuing.
The post State auditor rebukes Guillory admin for spoil banks project appeared first on thecurrentla.com
-
News from the South - Texas News Feed3 days ago
Rural Texas uses THC for health and economy
-
News from the South - Georgia News Feed6 days ago
South Carolina man detained by ICE over two years, ‘He is not here illegally’
-
News from the South - Alabama News Feed7 days ago
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Neighbor shares encounter with 18-year-old accused of beating her grandmother to de
-
News from the South - Georgia News Feed5 days ago
Berkeley County family sues Delta Airlines over explicit videos taken by employee on stolen iPad
-
Mississippi Today7 days ago
Some hope, some worries: Mississippi’s agriculture GDP is a mixed bag
-
News from the South - Texas News Feed6 days ago
How Trump's AI plan may impact energy costs
-
News from the South - Oklahoma News Feed7 days ago
Failed Seizure of a Vulnerable Vet at Oklahoma’s Largest Hospital Hints at Crisis to Come for Aging Population
-
Our Mississippi Home6 days ago
Mississippi Isn’t Just a State—It’s a State of Mind