Hospital safety bollard bill, sparked by KXAN, clears Senate
AUSTIN (KXAN) — A bill to require crash-rated safety bollards at hospitals across the state is one step closer to becoming law after clearing the Senate Wednesday in a vote of 23-7.
The security step is a direct response to KXAN's 'Preventing Disaster' investigations following a deadly crash at St. David's North Austin Medical Center last year.
'In recent history, reports of crashes at hospitals or emergency room entrances have surged members,' Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, who filed the bill following KXAN's investigation, told lawmakers on Tuesday during the bill's second reading. 'This issue has not only intensified in Texas but also has been reported across the United States, resulting in numerous tragedies.'
Last month, KXAN investigative reporter Matt Grant was invited to testify in front of a Senate panel about our own data analysis, which found hundreds of crashes at medical sites across the country resulting in at least 20 deaths over the past decade — a startling statistic that West highlighted.
EXPLORE: Preventing Disaster investigation uncovers hundreds of crashes nationwide
'According to media and official reports in the United States, there have been over 400 crashes into medical facilities in the last decade,' he said, referencing KXAN's findings. 'Additionally, in the state of Texas, alone, there have been more than 100 incidents since 2014.'
In response to industry concerns raised about Senate Bill 660, West filed a committee substitute that exempts hospitals in rural areas with a population of less than 68,000 people. Hospitals that already have bollards 'or similar type of effective device' are also exempt.
The Texas Hospital Association opposes the safety step, calling it an unfunded mandate that unfairly targets medical facilities.
Former Austin City Council Member Mackenzie Kelly, who initiated a city ordinance requiring crash-rated bollards at new hospitals, urgent care clinics and standalone emergency rooms — which unanimously passed and took effect in December — was also invited to testify in March. She told lawmakers expanding Austin's safety measure statewide will save lives.
'I'm proud that Austin was able to lead the way on this critical safety issue, and I'm grateful to see the Senate pass SB 660 today,' Kelly told KXAN Wednesday. 'After meeting with KXAN and the Bernard family affected by the crash at St. David's North Austin Medical Center, I knew we had to act.'
One of the votes against the measure came from Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood. Last month, he called KXAN's findings a 'major problem' and said he supported the bill's goal. At the time, Hall told us if hospitals 'aren't going to' install bollards, 'we in the legislature have a responsibility to protect the people of Texas.'
'Senator Hall does support the goal and feels that Hospitals should be proactive in this endeavor,' his chief of staff told KXAN in an email Wednesday after the Senate vote. 'He just could not get to the point to require it of them.'
The bill now goes to the House where it awaits a committee assignment. A companion House bill, HB 5392, a companion bill, was referred to that chamber's Public Health Committee this week and awaits a hearing.
'I hope the House will also pass this bill expediently so Texas can protect patients, families and healthcare workers at emergency rooms across Texas,' Kelly said. 'This is about saving lives and mitigating disaster before tragedy strikes, not partisan politics.'
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Yahoo
A wasting disease killed millions of sea stars. After years of searching, scientists just found a cause.
'It was like a battleground,' Drew Harvell remembers. 'It was really horrible.' She's reflecting on a time in December 2013, on the coast of Washington state, when she went out at low tide and saw hundreds of sick, dying sea stars. 'There were arms that had just fallen off the stars,' she says. 'It was really like a bomb had gone off.' The stars were suffering from something known as sea star wasting disease. It's a sickness that sounds like something out of a horror movie: Stars can develop lesions in their bodies. Eventually, their arms can detach and crawl away from them before the stars disintegrate completely. Harvell is a longtime marine ecologist whose specialty is marine diseases. And she was out for this low tide in 2013 because a massive outbreak of this seastar wasting had started spreading up and down the West Coast — from Mexico to Alaska — ultimately affecting around 20 distinct species of sea stars and wiping out entire populations in droves. In the decade since, some species have been able to bounce back, but others, like the sunflower sea star, continue to struggle. In California, for example, sunflower stars have almost completely died out. The question in 2013 was: What, exactly, was killing all these stars? While marine ecologists like Harvell could recognize the symptoms of seastar wasting, they weren't actually sure what was causing the disease. From the very beginning, though, it was something they wanted to figure out. And so, soon after the outbreak started, they collected sea stars to see if they could find a pathogen or other cause responsible for the wasting. The hunt for the culprit of this terrible, mysterious disease was on. Unfortunately, it was not straightforward. ' When this disease outbreak happened, we knew quite little about what was normal [in sea stars],' says Alyssa Gehman, who is also a marine disease ecologist. She says that when researchers are trying to do similar work to chase down a pathogen in, say, humans, they have an enormous trove of information to draw on about what bacteria and viruses are common to the human body, and what might be unusual. Not so for sea stars. ' We maybe had a little bit of information, but absolutely not enough to be able to really tease that out easily.' Also, Gehman says, there can be a lag before the disease expresses itself, so some stars have the pathogen that caused the disease, but don't present with symptoms yet, making it harder for scientists to even distinguish between sick stars and healthy ones as they run their tests. So even though a research team identified a virus that they thought might be associated with the wasting disease as early as 2014, over time, it became clear that it was most likely not the culprit, but rather just a virus present in many sea stars. 'The results were always confusing,' Harvell remembers. In the decade since the initial mass outbreak, other researchers have proposed other theories, but none have brought them to a definitive answer either. And yet, it became increasingly clear that an answer was needed, because people started to realize just how important the sunflower stars they had lost really were. ' We actually learned a lot from losing so many of these animals at once,' Gehman says. Before the outbreak, she says, they'd known that sunflower stars — giant sea stars that can be the size of dinner plates, or even bike tires — were skillful hunters and voracious eaters. They even knew that many things on the seafloor would run away from them. Gehman remembers taking a class on invertebrates back in college, where she learned that if you put even just the arm of a sunflower star in a tank with scallops, 'the tank would explode with scallops swimming everywhere trying to get away.' But all that fearsome hunting was, it seems, pretty key to ecosystem health. In many places, she says, ' after the sea sunflower stars were lost, the urchin populations exploded.' And so the die-off of the sunflower star and the explosion of urchins has been connected to the collapse of the Northern California kelp forests, a marine ecosystem that provides a home for a rich diversity of species. A cross-state, cross-organizational partnership between the Nature Conservancy and a variety of research institutions is working hard to breed sunflower seastars in captivity in the hopes that they can be reintroduced to the coast and reassume their role in their ecosystems. But as Harvell remembers, she and Gehman knew that no recovery project would be successful if they couldn't find the cause of sea star wasting disease. 'You're not gonna be able to get these stars back in nature if you don't know what's killing them,' she says. So in 2021, as part of the larger partnership, Harvell and Gehman, along with a number of their colleagues, launched into an epidemiological detective project. Their quest: to finally pin down the cause of seastar wasting disease. 'Really the work over the four years was done in the trenches by Dr. Melanie Prentice and Dr. Alyssa Gehman,' Harvell says, 'and then one of my students, Grace Crandall.' It was an emotionally difficult project because it required Gehman and her colleagues to deliberately infect many stars with the disease. 'It feels bad,' she admits, and they would be open about that in the lab, 'but we also can remember that we're doing this for the good of the whole species.' That work has paid off, though, and now, after four years of research, they've nailed their culprit in a paper out in Nature Ecology & Evolution today. What follows is a conversation with Drew Harvell, edited for clarity and length, about what she and her collaborators found, how marine ecologists do this kind of detective work, and what identifying the culprit could mean for the future health of seastars. How did you start the journey to figure out what actually had happened? Well, we chose to work with the sunflower star because we knew it was the most susceptible and therefore was going to give us the most clear-cut results. So we set up at Marrowstone Point, which was the USGS Fisheries virus lab [in Washington state], because that would give us the proper quarantine conditions and lots of running seawater. The proper quarantine conditions — what does that mean? All of the outflow water has to be cleansed of any potential virus or bacterium, and so all of the water has to be run through virus filters and also actually bleached in the end, so that we're sure that nothing could get out. We did not want to do this work at our lab, Friday Harbor Labs, or at any of the Hakai labs in Canada because we were really worried that if we were holding animals with an infectious agent in our tanks without really stringent quarantine protocols, that we could be contributing to the outbreak. So you have these sea stars. They're in this quarantined environment. What is the methodology here? What are you doing to them or with them? So the question is: Is there something in a diseased star that's making a healthy star sick? And that's like the most important thing to demonstrate right from the beginning — that it is somehow transmissible. And so Melanie and Alyssa early on showed that even water that washed over a sick star would make healthy stars sick, and if you co-house them in the same aquarium, the healthy ones would always get sick when they were anywhere near or exposed to the water from a diseased star. There's something in the water. That's right. There's something in the water. But they wanted to refine it a little bit more and know that it was something directly from the diseased star. And so they created a slurry from the tissues of the disease star and injected that into the healthy star to be able to show that there really was something infectious from the disease star that was making the healthy star sick and then die. And then you control those kinds of what we call 'challenge experiments' by inactivating in some way that slurry of infected disease stuff. And in this case, what they were able to do was to 'heat-kill' [any pathogens in this slurry] by heating it up. And so the thing that was very successful right from the beginning was that the stars that were infected with a presumptive disease got sick and died, and the controls essentially stayed healthy. You do that control to make sure that it's not like…injecting a slurry into a star is what makes them sick? That's right. And you're also having animals come in sick, right? So you want to know that they weren't just gonna get sick anyway. You want to be sure that it was what you did that actually affected their health status. So you have a slurry — like a milkshake of sea star — and you know that within it is a problematic agent of some kind. How do you figure out what is in that milkshake that is the problem? The real breakthrough came when Alyssa had the idea that maybe we should try a cleaner infection source and decided to test the coelomic fluid, which is basically the blood of the star. With a syringe, you can extract the coelomic fluid of the sick star and you can also heat-kill it, and you can do the same experiment challenging with that. And it was a really exciting moment because she and Melanie confirmed that that was a really effective way of transmitting the disease because it's cleaner. It's cleaner, like there's less stuff than in the tissue? Like blood is just like a simpler material? Right. So, that was really the beginning of being able to figure out what it was that was in the coelomic fluid that was causing the disease. So basically it's like: … So it seems like it might be ingredient B that's causing the problem here because it's consistent across all samples? Yeah, that's exactly it. And so then that was very, very incredibly exciting. Wow. There's this one bacterium — Vibrio pectenicida — that's showing up in all of the diseased material samples. Could it be that? We weren't sure. We sort of thought, after 12 years, this is gonna be something so strange! So weird! You know, something alien that we've never seen before. And so to have a Vibrio — something that we think of as a little bit more common — turn up was really surprising. Then one of our colleagues at the University of British Columbia, Amy Chan, was able to culture that particular bacterium from the disease star. And so now she had a pure culture of the presumptive killer. And then last summer, Melanie and Alyssa were able to test that again under quarantine conditions and find that it immediately killed the stars that were tested. How did you all feel? Oh, we were definitely dancing around the room. It was — just such a happy moment of fulfillment. I really do like to say that at the beginning of the task that Nature Conservancy handed us — to figure out the causative agent — we told them again and again that this is a very risky project. We can't guarantee we're going to be successful. So yeah, we were incredibly elated when we really felt confident in the answer. It was just hundreds and hundreds of hours of tests and challenge experiments that came out so beautifully. What does it mean to finally have an answer here? What are the next steps? This was the part of it that really kept me awake at night because I just felt so worried early on at the idea that we were working on a roadmap to recovery of a species without knowing what was killing it, and I just felt like we couldn't do it if we were flying blind like that. We wouldn't know what season the pathogenic agent came around. We wouldn't know what its environmental reservoirs were. We didn't know what was making stars susceptible. It was going to be really hard, and it wasn't going to feel right to just put animals out in the wild without knowing more. And so knowing that this is one of the primary causative agents — maybe the only causative agent — allows us to test for it in the water. It allows us to find out if there are some bays where this is being concentrated, to find out if there are some foods the stars are eating that are concentrating this bacterium and delivering a lethal dose to a star. Now we'll be able to answer those questions, and I think that's going to give us a really good opportunity to design better strategies for saving them. It feels like you now have a key to use to sort of unlock various pieces of this. We totally do. And it's so exciting and so gratifying because that's what we're supposed to do, right? As scientists and as disease ecologists, we're supposed to solve these mysteries. And it feels really great to have solved this one. And I don't think there's a day in the last 12 years that I haven't thought about it and been really frustrated we didn't know what it was. So it's particularly gratifying to me to have to have reached this point. Drew Harvell is the author of many popular science books about marine biology and ecology, including her latest, The Ocean's Menagerie. She also wrote a book about marine disease called Ocean Outbreak. Solve the daily Crossword
The Hill
a day ago
- The Hill
New Hampshire becomes first Northeastern state to ban gender-affirming care for minors
New Hampshire is the first Northeastern state to ban gender-affirming health care for minors after its Republican governor gave final approval to bills that will ban the use of certain prescription medications and surgeries to treat gender dysphoria beginning next year. Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a former U.S. senator who won New Hampshire's gubernatorial election in November, signed two bills Friday restricting access to transition-related care in the state, which already prohibits rare genital surgeries for minors to transition. House Bill 377 prohibits doctors from administering puberty blockers and hormones to transgender youth starting Jan. 1. Like a handful of other, similar measures adopted by nearly all Republican-led states, New Hampshire's prohibition includes a 'grandfather clause' that allows minors already receiving care to continue doing so even after the law goes into effect. The second bill, House Bill 712, builds on New Hampshire's existing restrictions on gender-affirming surgery. The measure, which will also take effect in January, bars adolescents younger than 18 from undergoing certain procedures when they are used to treat gender dysphoria, including facial feminization or masculinization surgery and 'transgender chest surgery.' In a statement, Ayotte said, 'Medical decisions made at a young age can carry lifelong consequences, and these bills represent a balanced, bipartisan effort to protect children.' The New Hampshire House approved HB 377 in June, with two Democrats, state Reps. Dale Girard and Jonah Wheeler, voting with nearly all Republicans to advance the measure. Eleven Democrats were excused from voting. New Hampshire senators approved the bill in a 16-8 party-line vote. Wheeler joined House Republicans again in voting to pass HB 712, and 11 Democrats again were excused. The state Senate approved the measure in June in another vote along party lines. New Hampshire state Rep. Lisa Mazur, a Republican and the prime sponsor of both bills, celebrated their approval Friday in a post on X. 'My two bills that will protect NH kids from irreversible harm were just signed into law by Gov. Ayotte. We are now the 1st state in New England the whole Northeast to do so. Go NH!!' Mazur wrote. In June, while defending House Bill 377, Mazur pointed to a recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors. 'It is now legal and constitutional for states to regulate and or ban the use of these harmful drugs in minors,' she said. LGBTQ rights groups immediately condemned Ayotte's signature on the bills, which they said ignore testimony from transgender youth who have benefited from gender-affirming care and statements from major medical organizations that such care for transgender adults and minors is medically necessary and can be lifesaving. 'It is heartbreaking to witness lawmakers inserting themselves into deeply personal, private conversations between families, their doctors, and their children,' Julia Hawthorne, a board member of the state LGBTQ rights group 603 Equality, wrote on Facebook. Linds Jakows, the organization's founder, said transgender young people in New Hampshire 'are not only tangibly losing access to life-saving healthcare — but also receiving a disturbing message of rejection from their state government.' 'To youth impacted by these bills, please know: You are loved, you are worthy of respect and dignity, and there is a community here in New Hampshire and beyond that is ready to support you,' they said. The Campaign for Southern Equality, an LGBTQ rights group that has since 2023 distributed more than $900,000 in grants to families of transgender children needing to travel out-of-state for gender-affirming care, announced on Friday that it would expand its Trans Youth Emergency Project into New Hampshire. 'Every day I speak with families of transgender youth who are worried about the future. Many are panicking, unsure of where or when they'll get the medicine that their child needs to continue leading a healthy, happy life,' said Van Bailey, a patient navigator for the program. 'These laws are cruelly thrusting families into impossible choices, and it is deeply unfair.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
After a decade of death, Canadian scientists say they've found the sea star killer
Scientists say they have found the cause behind the disease that turns vibrant, 24-armed sea stars into puddles of goo. Melanie Prentice, a research scientist at the Hakai Institute, is part of a team that has spent years investigating the cause of this disease. Their research was published on Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. "The agent is a bacteria. It's called Vibrio pectinicida," Prentice told CBC News. After a decade of these creatures being pushed to the brink of extinction, experts say this is the first step in a road to recovery, not just for this species, but for a critical support in humanity's defence against climate change. Twisted arms that walk away The most affected species are sunflower sea stars, which once boasted a range along the west coast of North America, from Baja California to Alaska. Then, in 2013, a mass die-off occurred from sea star wasting disease. And it's a gruesome end. "Their arms kind of twist back on themselves, so they get kind of into puzzle pieces," said Alyssa Gehman, a marine disease ecologist who is also part of the Hakai Institute research team. They then tend to lose their arms, and then, "their arms will sort of walk away from their bodies." Soon after, Gehman says that lesions form and the sea stars dissolve and die. The paper estimates that more than 87 per cent of sunflower sea stars in northern parts of the west coast have been killed. In the southern habitat ranges, the species is considered functionally extinct. "When it first happened, it was just fields and fields of puddles of dying sea star goo," said Sara Hamilton, science co-ordinator for the Oregon Kelp Alliance. Hamilton was not involved in the research. "It was like something out of a horror movie." The hunt for the star killer Multiple theories identifying the cause either didn't pan out or were disproven. What the team did in this case was take healthy sea stars into the lab and expose them to infection. They did this over several years to try and isolate the cause. Gehman explained the process: "We take body fluid or tissue from a sick star and then we put that experimentally into other sea stars that we know are healthy." The paper's result was that 92 per cent of these exposures worked in transmitting the disease to the healthy star — killing it within 20 days. These experiments also revealed that Vibrio pectinicida was the most likely culprit. Experts are impressed with the paper's diligence and effort. "They didn't just stop when they found one level of evidence — they went and found a second level of evidence and a third level of evidence," said Hamilton, from Oregon Kelp Alliance. Amanda Bates, ocean conservation professor at the University of Victoria, also said "there's a pathway — essentially that you isolate disease agents and link them to being a cause of an outbreak — and this research team followed those processes perfectly." Hope for recovery Knowing the cause provides hope for restoration efforts, experts say. "Now we can go out and actually do tests and see the actual prevalence of this pathogen in the field," said Gehman. Furthermore, any captive breeding programs that are trying to restore sea star populations can now screen and test those populations before putting them back into a risky environment. Hamilton agrees. "That's one of the things we're most worried about with some of these recovery efforts," she said. "If we do captive breeding and outplant, we certainly don't want to introduce … a new outbreak of the disease." The lost decade Bates, who has seen this disease as far back as 2009, is cautious about the rush to recovery. "While we know disease impacts us as humans, I think we often forget that it impacts wildlife," she told CBC News. "We're a decade on since that really big mass mortality event, and we still don't have pycnopodia [sunflower sea stars] recovering in many places." Hamilton said the reintroduction of sunflower sea stars will be valuable because of what their absence has meant for ecosystems. Sea urchin populations have gone up — which also means kelp forests have been decimated. "Urchins are kind of like the goats of the ocean," she said. "They'll eat anything, they just mow things down." Restoring the sea star means kelp forests might once again thrive. This will likely mean improvements to biodiversity, food, tourism as well as serve as coastline defences against erosion and storms supercharged by climate change. "It's definitely our ally in the climate crisis," Prentice said. "I think when we're talking about sea star wasting disease, we're not just talking about the sea star species — which we love in their own right — but entire marine ecosystems that have collapsed because of this epidemic."
