Pueblo County Research Articles

NOVEL AVIBACTERIUM SPECIES ASSOCIATED WITH SINUSITIS AND CONJUNCTIVITIS IN A MERRIAM'S WILD TURKEY (MELEAGRIS GALLOPAVO MERRIAMI) FLOCK IN COLORADO, USA.

A Merriam's Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo merriami) with periocular swelling and periocular skin crusting in Pueblo County, Colorado, USA, was diagnosed with severe catarrhal and fibrinous sinusitis and conjunctivitis. A novel clade of Avibacterium was detected in the exudate from this bird. Although eight additional turkeys culled from the affected flock did not have clinical signs or gross lesions, histologically all had mild-to-moderate chronic sinusitis, and infraorbital cultures yielded the same novel clade of Avibacterium that was found in the symptomatic turkey. The presence of this Avibacterium species in the absence of significant disease in some birds suggested that other factors might have been involved in the development of severe sinusitis and conjunctivitis in the symptomatic Wild Turkey. Negative culture results from a distant flock of Wild Turkeys, acquired with similar methods to the affected flock, suggested that this novel species of Avibacterium was not widespread throughout Wild Turkeys in Colorado.

Addressing health care needs of Colorado immigrants using a community power building approach.

To assess and address through policy change the health-care needs of immigrant populations in Colorado. Primary data were collected in two Colorado communities from June 2019 through December 2020. This work utilized a mixed-method, community power building approach to determine and meet health-care needs of immigrants, a marginalized population of mixed documentation status. Findings were then used to inform Emergency Medicaid (EM) expansion in Colorado. In-depth interviews were conducted in Spanish, English, and Somali with 47 immigrants in rural Morgan County in June-September 2019; findings were presented to the community for feedback in January-February 2020. In March-December 2020, 330 interviews were conducted in Spanish and English with 208 unique individuals in Morgan and Pueblo Counties by local community grassroots leaders via four rounds of a novel phone tree outreach method. Interviewees were identified through snowball sampling and direct outreach among individuals seeking immediate relief (i.e., food assistance). Interviewees reported numerous barriers to health-care access, including discrimination and limited service hours and transportation options. Data also revealed a clear health insurance coverage gap among undocumented immigrants. These data were then presented to Colorado's Department of Health-Care Policy and Financing, ultimately contributing to securing EM expansion to this population to include COVID treatment, including respiratory therapies and outpatient follow-up appointments. Data-informed continued implementation advocacy to ensure the effectiveness of EM program expansion. Immigrants are particularly marginalized by the health-care system. Rapid data collection grounded in a community power-building approach produced data that directly informed state policy and an increased power base. This approach enables direct connection to immediate "downstream" needs in communities while simultaneously building collective systemic "upstream" analysis and capacity of community members and laying pathways to translation and implementation of research into policy.

The Social Impacts of Legal Marijuana in Pueblo, Colorado: Executive Summary

In December of 2016, the Pueblo County Commissioners contracted with the newly-established Institute of Cannabis Research (ICR) at Colorado State University - Pueblo to study the impacts of legal cannabis on Pueblo County. In the years since 2012, the year that Colorado voters approved Amendment 64, Pueblo has opened the door wider to legal cannabis than many other Colorado counties. In addition to licensing medical and retail cannabis dispensaries, Pueblo County has also approved cannabis grows and cannabis product development companies. It is reasonable to assume that newly legalized cannabis dispensaries, grows, and product development companies will have a significant impact on Pueblo County. Rather than operating in the dark, the Pueblo County Commissioners requested an Impact Study from the Institute of Cannabis Research to shed light on the social impacts of legal cannabis.

The Impact of Legal Cannabis on Demographics in Pueblo County

Demography is the science of people-counting. Demographically-speaking, the impacts of legal cannabis on Pueblo County have been modest thus far. Apart from slow, steady population increases, the characteristics of Pueblo’s population have largely gone unchanged since the passage of Amendment 64.

The Impact of Legal Cannabis on Poverty and Homelessness in Pueblo County

Poverty is a state of economic distress. In the US, measures of poverty are standardized by the federal government. Poverty and homelessness are related, but they are distinct demographic phenomena. There are many poor Americans who are not homeless. Homelessness is caused by a combination of a crisis-inducing economic shock and a lack of affordable housing. The most severely housing-challenged Americans spend 87% of their annual incomes on housing. According to Don Burnes, the Executive Director of the Burnes Center on Poverty and Homelessness, for many impoverished families, an unanticipated expense of $400 is sufficient to trigger a plunge into homelessness. There is no evidence that poverty has either increased or decreased in Pueblo as a result of cannabis legalization. There is evidence that homelessness in Pueblo has increased recently. Apart from anecdotal reports, there is no scientific evidence that links increased homelessness to legal cannabis. Instead, Black Hills Energy disconnected utilities from more than 7,000 Pueblo homes in 2016 and is, according to Posada's Anne Stattelman, the largest single cause of homelessness in Pueblo, It's the number one reason families are becoming homeless in our community.

A new homolid crab, Zygastrocarcinus tricki sp. nov., from the Pierre Shale (middle Campanian), Baculite Mesa, Pueblo County, Colorado, USA

Abstract A new species of homolid crab, Zygastrocarcinus tricki sp. nov., is reported from the Late Cretaceous (middle Campanian, Baculites scotti Zone) of the Pierre Shale Formation (Baculite Mesa, Pueblo County, Colorado). This nearly complete homolid, hereto described is the sixth species assigned to the genus and extends our knowledge along with the geographical range and geological age of this taxon.

Analyzing the Role of Community and Individual Factors in Food Insecurity: Identifying Diverse Barriers Across Clustered Community Members.

This paper uses the results from a community food security assessment survey of 684 residents and three focus groups in Pueblo County, Colorado to examine the question: what community and individual factors contribute to or alleviate food insecurity, and are these factors consistent throughout a sub-county population. Importantly, we use a technique called cluster analysis to endogenously determine the key factors pertinent to food access and fruit and vegetable consumption. Our results show significant heterogeneity among sub-population clusters in terms of the community and individual factors that would make it easier to get access to fruits and vegetables. We find two distinct clusters of food insecure populations: the first was significantly less likely to identify increased access to fruits and vegetables proximate to where they live or work as a way to improve their household's healthy food consumption despite being significantly less likely to utilize a personal vehicle to get to the store; the second group did not report significant challenges with access, rather with affordability. We conclude that though interventions focused on improving the local food retail environment may be important for some subsamples of the food insecure population, it is unclear that proximity to a store with healthy food will support enhanced food security for all. We recommend that future research recognizes that determinants of food insecurity may vary within county or zip code level regions, and that multiple interventions that target sub-population clusters may elicit better improvements in access to and consumption of fruits and vegetables.

Siphonaptera ofPeromyscusin the Niobrara Chalk Barrens, Colorado

Abstract We collected 327 Peromyscus truei (pinyon deermice), 211 P. maniculatus (North American deermice), and 38 P. leucopus (white-footed deermice) on Fort Carson Military Reservation, Pueblo County, Colorado, during May–June 2007. The deermice hosted 408 fleas including 238 Aetheca wagneri, 169 Orchopeas leucopus, and 1 Meringis parkeri. Both A. wagneri and O. leucopus were on all species of deermice. Prevalence of fleas was 42.1% for P. leucopus, 36.4% for P. truei, and 35.1% for P. maniculatus. Prevalence of O. leucopus was significantly greater for P. truei (43.1%) than for P. maniculatus (13.7%) and P. leucopus (13.2%). Conversely, P. maniculatus (52.1%) had a significantly greater prevalence of A. wagneri than either P. leucopus (47.1%) or P. truei (33.6%).

Chemical Warfare: Eliminating Cold War-era munitions will cost more, take longer

The Department of Defense says it will cost about $2.6 billion more and take two years more than previously estimated to completely eliminate the nation’s remaining stockpile of obsolete chemical weapons. The total projected cost for destruction programs at the last two military installations where chemical warfare materials are stored is now $10.6 billion. The Pentagon says the weapons held at the Blue Grass Army Depot, in Madison County, Ky., likely will not be destroyed until 2023, rather than by 2021. The completion date for final destruction of the stockpile at the Pueblo Chemical Depot, in Pueblo County, Colo., has also been revised from 2017 to 2019. The new estimates include a “more conservative and realistic assessment” of potential operational problems that might occur, says Conrad F. Whyne, executive officer of the Army’s Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives (ACWA) program. “Estimating costs and schedules for large, complex construction projects, which will ...

Multiple decrement modeling in the presence of interval censoring and masking

A self-consistent algorithm will be proposed to non-parametrically estimate the cause-specific cumulative incidence functions (CIFs) in an interval censored, multiple decrement context. More specifically, the censoring mechanism will be assumed to be a mixture of case 2 interval-censored data with the additional possibility of exact observations. The proposed algorithm is a generalization of the classical univariate algorithms of Efron and Turnbull. However, unlike any previous non-parametric models proposed in the literature to date, the algorithm will explicitly allow for the possibility of any combination of masked modes of failure, where failure is known only to occur due to a subset from the set of all possible causes. A simulation study is also conducted to demonstrate the consistency of the estimators of the CIFs produced by the proposed algorithm, as well as to explore the effect of masking. The paper concludes by applying the method to masked mortality data obtained for Pueblo County, CO, for three risks: death by cancer; cardiovascular failure; or other.

Joe Arridy, “The Happiest Man Who Ever Lived on Death Row”

Most persons would feel an unspeakable repulsion about ever living on death row of an American prison. The lights are kept on night and day. Guards watch closely so no inmate can quietly sneak into oblivion before the official governmentsanctioned ‘‘send-off’’ day. As the day of death comes closer, the physical and mental strain can be awful. How could anyone laugh for joy in a setting like this? There was once a man who did.

POLICY: Smoking Bans Yield Long-Term Benefits

When it comes to linking cigarette smoke to heart attacks, one might assume that such a link would apply only as long as one is smoking or being exposed to secondhand smoke. That’s not necessarily true, however, at least according to a follow-up study of people living in and around Pueblo, Colorado. In the 2 January 2009 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), researchers reported that hospitalizations in Pueblo for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) showed a steady, continuous decline three years after the city introduced a smoking ban in all public buildings. In November 2005, researchers first began to report that a smoking ban in all public buildings in Pueblo was associated with a significant reduction in the number of hospitalizations for AMI [see EHP 114:A154 (2006)]. In the 18 months after the ban came into force, the number of such hospitalizations fell 27%, from 257 to 187 per 100,000 person-years. Only a small reduction was seen for the population living outside the city limits, and no reduction was seen in neighboring El Paso County—areas unaffected by the ban. The new figures published in MMWR examine the three years since the smoking ban began and show that the number of hospitalizations for AMI has continued to decline to 152 per 100,000 person-years, says Robert Alsever, medical director for health information at the Parkview Medical Center in Pueblo and first author of the update report. That’s a 19% reduction over the figure for the first 18 months after the ban began and a total 41% reduction since the ban started, he says. The point at which these improvements will level off remains to be seen. In a review published in the February 2009 issue of Preventive Medicine, Lorenzo Richiardi and colleagues noted that at least 10 studies in the United States and Europe had reported a reduction in the number of hospital admissions for AMI in the months following the introduction of regulations banning smoking in public places. The decreases observed ranged from 8% in New York State to 40% in Helena, Montana. Specifically, the Helena study found a 40% decline in hospital admissions for AMI during a 6-month smoking ordinance within Helena city limits; however, this was a relatively small population study. An editorial note that accompanies the MMWR report observes that a meta-analysis of seven other studies and one unpublished study yielded a pooled estimate of a 19% reduction in AMI hospitalization rates after implementation of public smoking bans. Three studies suggested these reductions were more pronounced among non smokers than among smokers. The Pueblo study, however, did not assess what portion of the observed decrease in hospitalizations could be attributed to reduced secondhand smoke exposure among nonsmokers or to quitting among smokers. Even though the prevalence of smoking dropped in Pueblo County as a whole, the difference over time was not statistically significant. As the editorial note explains, “the ecologic nature of this study precludes definite conclusions about the extent to which the observed decline in AMI hospitalizations in the city of Pueblo was attributable to the smoke-free ordinance.” One concept that may begin making its way into tobacco control policies and programs is that of “thirdhand smoke,” which refers to the chemicals in cigarette smoke that settle on the surfaces inside a home. Jonathan Winickoff, a pediatrician at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, is one of a growing number who believe these deposited chemicals pose a hazard to occupants’ health days after a cigarette is stubbed out. “Children are particularly likely to come into contact with this third-hand smoke,’” explains Winickoff. “The chemicals in smoke may stick to objects for many days and are gradually released back into the air, so infants and children breathe in and ingest tobacco toxins as they crawl over, mouth, and play on contaminated surfaces.” In a survey published in the January 2009 issue of Pediatrics, Winickoff’s team asked U.S. adults to describe their beliefs about the health effects of second- and thirdhand cigarette smoke. Many people reported believing that thirdhand smoke is far less of a health concern for children than secondhand smoke. Those who did report believing thirdhand smoke poses a hazard to children were more likely to enact strict smoking bans inside their homes. Says Winickoff, “These findings suggest that if more people understood the dangers of thirdhand smoking, especially to their children, we might see more nonsmoking policies adopted in the home.”

Smoking Bans Prevent Heart Attacks

In this issue of Circulation , Bartecchi and colleagues1 describe a reduction in hospitalizations for acute myocardial infarction in Pueblo, Colo, after the implementation of a city-wide smoking ordinance. The ordinance, which was strictly enforced, prohibited smoking in all workplaces, including bars and restaurants, and in all buildings open to the public. The findings in Pueblo confirm a similar assessment of the consequences of a public smoking ban in Helena, Mont, which was the first such assessment reported.2 In the Montana study, the law was in force for 6 months before a challenge led to a court order suspending it. Admissions for acute myocardial infarction declined by 40% during the 6 months of the ban and then rose after it was lifted. Article p 1490 Replication is critical in inferring causality.3 The drop in hospitalizations for acute myocardial infarction after the ban in Pueblo provides clear confirmation of the results in Helena. The new report1 has several strengths. The number of hospitalizations (855) is large, so the impact of the ban can be precisely estimated; the statistical analysis indicates that the findings are highly unlikely to have arisen by chance. The design incorporated 2 comparison populations: residents of Pueblo County outside of the city of Pueblo and residents of El Paso County, which includes Colorado Springs. By including these comparison populations, Bartecchi et al1 were able to account for temporal trends of a decline in hospitalizations for acute myocardial infarction that might have mistakenly been attributed to the ordinance. Their final regression model estimated a decline of approximately 30% in the hospitalization rate after the ordinance; there was no decline in El Paso County. This beneficial effect is of sufficient magnitude to be readily visible in their …

"Made by Toile"? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858-1917

Once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic. —Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” 1980 It takes work to erase labor from a landscape. John Watt knew this cruel irony not only in the synapses of his mind but also in the sinews of his body. Bent and almost broken, struggling to avoid the ignominy of a pauper's death, the old man contemplated the past from his quarters on the Pueblo County, Colorado, poor farm in the late winter of 1917. The frontier to which Watt had ventured as a young railroad builder some forty—seven years earlier had become a modern place rife with modern contradictions. At once a paragon of natural splendor, a major battleground between labor and capital, and an epicenter of mineral-intensive industrialization, Colorado expressed in microcosm the emerging contradictions between forces whose power stretched far beyond the mountains and plains. Looking back on a life forged by and amid those tensions, Watt struggled to figure out how and why he had disappeared from both the history he had helped make and the landscapes his toil had helped construct.1

The Avery Ranch Site Revisited

Recent excavations were undertaken at the Avery Ranch site (5PE56) in Pueblo County, southeastern Colorado. Earlier excavations were conducted in the 1960s by the University of Denver, and the site...

Distribution Status of the Cotton Rat (Sigmodon hispidus) in Colorado

The hispid cotton rat (Sigmodon hispidus) was first reported in Colorado when Goldman and Gardner (J. Mamm., 28:57-59, 1947) reviewed a series of 13 specimens collected by Alfred M. Bailey in 1946 from a site 11 mi. N Springfield, Baca County. Hansen (J. Mamm., 44:126, 1963) recorded a specimen from 18 mi. N Lamar in Kiowa County. Armstrong (Monogr., Univ. Kansas Mus. Nat. Hist., 3:x + 1-415) summarized the known distribution to include additional specimens from Bent (2 mi. S, 2 mi. E Hasty), Baca (Two Buttes Reservoir; 14 mi. N, 4 mi. E Springfield; 6 mi. W Williams' Corner; I. N. Pruitt Farm, near Williams' Corner, 11 mi. N Springfield), and Cheyenne (5 mi. E Kit Carson) counties. Subsequently, Carey (J. Mamm., 59:624, 1978) collected cotton rats near the Pueblo Army Depot northwest of Boone in Pueblo County. Additional specimens, herein reported, were collected by personnel from the Museum of the High Plains (MHP) from Baca and Pueblo counties as well as the first record from Otero County. Some of those specimens are housed in the National Fish and Wildlife (NFW) collection in Fort Collins. Unreported specimens collected in 1970 (Jim Fitzgerald, pers. comm.) and housed at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) are also noted. Specimens examined, 36, distributed as follows: BACA COUNTY: 61/4 mi. S, 91/2 mi. W Campo, 1 (MHP); 4V2 mi. S Vilas, 1 (MHP); CROWLEY COUNTY: 3 mi. E Sugar City, 6 (UNC); PUEBLO COUNTY: 3 mi. N, 93/4 mi. W Goodnight, 11 (NFW); 23/4 mi. N, 73/4 mi. W Goodnight, 1 (NFW); 31/2 mi. N, 103/4 mi. W Goodnight, 2 (NFW); 3 mi. N, 9 mi. W Goodnight, 2 (NFW); 21/2 mi. N, 83 /4mi. W Goodnight 6 (3 NFW, 3 MHP); OTERO COUNTY: 153/4 mi. S, 4 mi. E La Junta, 2 (MHP). It should be noted that all specimens in southeastern Colorado have been collected on or near tributaries of the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers. There are two possibilities to explain the current distribution of cotton rats in southeastern Colorado. The first is dispersal from surrounding states. Dispersal might have occurred from western Kansas along riparian habitats afforded by the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers and their tributaries or it might have occurred northward into Colorado from New Mexico along

Widespread, Synchronously Deposited, Burrow-Mottled Limestone Beds in Greenhorn Limestone (Upper Cretaceous) of Kansas and Southeastern Colorado

In central Kansas the Hartland Shale and Jetmore Chalk Members of the Greenhorn Limestone contain 16 burrow-mottled, ledge-forming, chalky limestone beds that can be traced across the entire outcrop. The same beds are recognized in equivalent strata of the Bridge Creek Limestone Member of westernmost Kansas, and all but one or two can be recognized in a Bridge Creek exposure in southwestern Pueblo County, Colorado. For a distance of nearly 450 mi some of these beds lie on, below, or close to equally persistent bentonite seams. The parallelism of bentonite seams and adjacent or nearly adjacent beds of limestone, and the uniform relative spacing of all the limestone beds prove that some of the latter are time parallel and suggest most convincingly that each of these widespr ad beds is time parallel. In contrast to intervening beds of laminated shaly chalk, the limestone beds lack internal stratification because of activity of a highly mobile infauna. The shaly chalk beds contain higher percentages of terrigenous detritus, organic carbon, and pyrite than the limestone beds, and are interpreted as reflecting greater rates of terrigenous detrital influx and an interstitial reducing environment that was inimical to development of a burrowing infauna. Smaller organic carbon and pyrite content of the limestones is believed to reflect a lower clay content of original sediments, and at least a partly oxidizing interstitial environment, as suggested by the high degree of bioturbation. Despite substrate differences, the aqueous environment directly above the sediment-water interface did not change significantly as sediment type alternated from detritus-rich to detritus-poor, because the shelly epifauna is essentially the same in adjacent be s of shaly chalk and chalky limestone. The widespread, apparently time-parallel limestone beds are believed to be the result of regionally manifested changes in volume of terrigenous detrital influx, coming principally from the west, that were superimposed on a more or less continuous accumulation of carbonate sediments. The noncrushed condition of macrofossils and fecal pellets suggests that limestone beds suffered early lithification; this process was probably influenced by initially greater purity of limestone-forming muds, slower sedimentation, and interstitial circulation resulting from bioturbation.

Illegitimate pregnancies in state institutions.

THE PREVENTION of illegitimate pregnancy in the resident population of state institutions is but one of many human concerns of the administrators of state mental hospitals and schools for the mentally retarded. While the rate of incidence of illegitimate pregnancy in institutionalized population is lower than in the population at large, there is an absolute sense in which each illegitimate pregnancy in an institutionalized patient is a tragedy. The general public is keenly aware of this, and will loudly condemn the institutional administrator who does not keep illegitimate pregnancies in his institution at a minimum. Failure to do so can threaten a total program. Illegitimate pregnancies figured heavily in a 1962 report of a Pueblo County Grand Jury investigation of the Colorado State Hospital. While the number of illegitimate pregnancies for which the hospital might be thought indirectly responsible was small,

Baculite Mesa, Pueblo County, Colorado

Baculite Mesa, Pueblo County, Colorado

Exploration Developments in Colorado-Nebraska, 1965-1966: ABSTRACT

During the past 12 months, total exploration and development drilling in the Denver basin maintained the relatively low but consistent plateau established during the previous year. Approximately 80-90% of the tests were drilled by independent operators. Major oil companies have been active in development drilling, secondary-recovery projects, and exploration in pre-Cretaceous formations, particularly the Permian and Pennsylvanian. Significant discoveries in the Cretaceous D and J sandstone bodies were found in the older so-called fairway part of the basin. Here both subsurface control and land are available. In the available-land category are Logan and Morgan Counties, Colorado, and Cheyenne County, Nebraska. Seismic activity took place only in the following areas: Weld County, east of Black Hollow field, the extreme southern part of the basin in Crowley and Pueblo Counties, and in the evaluation of D and J sandstone prospects. The Colorado and Nebraska legislatures passed involuntary unitization laws. This, together with improved secondary-recovery methods, should increase ultimate recovery and profit on a per-well basis. Largely because of the increased number of tests and information available, a few companies are using computers in their exploration programs. The exploration pattern established during the past few years should continue. End_of_Article - Last_Page 2029------------