SUMMARY: The Lafayette City and Parish councils have several key items on their agendas this week. The parish plans to put two failed property tax millages back on the ballot in a November special election to avoid a $24 million budget shortfall impacting roads and public health. A $400,000 parish contribution is proposed for South Larriviere Road improvements, matching a federal grant. The Northeast Regional Library is moving forward with a 99-year lease on Holy Rosary Institute land. Lafayette City Council will allocate $3 million in federal transit grants and $189,000 for traffic calming projects. The city will donate adjudicated properties to Acts of Love, a nonprofit focused on affordable housing. Additionally, Lafayette will enter a state agreement to maintain DOTD roads including I-10 and I-49. The Bloomberg Mayors Challenge grant application is underway to address stormwater infiltration.

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SUMMARY: The Ouachita Green Internship Program offers middle and high school students (grades 8–12) living in Ouachita Parish, including public, homeschool, or those attending school outside the parish, a chance to earn community service hours. Interns commit to two hours monthly, with flexible scheduling to fit busy lives. The program involves community cleanups, education, recycling events, and household waste disposal projects, fostering teamwork and local impact. Last year, 42 interns contributed over 1,000 service hours. Applications are available at ouachitagreen.org, with a deadline of August 21. The program also offers scholarships, awards, and opportunities for broader community involvement.

NBC 10 News Today: Ouachita Green Internship Program

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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.”

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.