New CWD test: Game-changer or unproven?
Good morning. Happy Friday.
Let's take a deeper look at how Mayor Frey won a second term, plus a story about a new test for chronic wasting disease. Will it help slow the spread?
Windy today. Expect partly cloudy skies with highs in the mid-50s. | |
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| Mayor Jacob Frey gives a speech during an election party as early results bode well for his campaign on Tuesday. Frey was declared the winner Wednesday. Tim Evans for MPR News |
Jacob Frey’s opponents identified their strategy to defeat the incumbent mayor: don’t rank him.
Supporters of Sheila Nezhad, Kate Knuth, or other candidates could mark whatever candidate they preferred as their first-choice candidate. As long as they didn’t include Frey as an option anywhere on their ballots, the hope went, the anti-Frey vote would automatically consolidate to unseat him via ranked-choice voting. And so activists embraced the slogan: “Don’t Rank Frey.”
But thousands of voters didn’t listen. Not only did Frey collect the most first-choice votes — 43 percent — but another 9 percent of voters ranked him as their second choice, and 7.5 percent as their third choice.
The result: another term for Frey. | |
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University of Minnesota researcher Dr. Tiffany Wolf collects samples from an area of northern Minnesota where carcasses of deer infected with chronic wasting disease were dumped.
Courtesy Peter Larsen |
By Dan Gunderson
When a chronic wasting disease outbreak in a herd of captive deer in Beltrami County was discovered earlier this year, it was the result of investigators tracing a connection to potentially infected animals moved there from a Winona County farm.
That's often the case with CWD outbreaks — investigators tracing the movement of infected animals after the fact.
Chronic wasting disease is an always fatal neurodegenerative disease spread by malformed proteins, called prions, which are spread by infected animals.
As Minnesota officials work to contain the spread of CWD in deer, researchers are developing new technology that can help track the disease sooner.
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Vaccine clinics for younger children expand in Minnesota. Sixteen Minnesota schools hosted COVID-19 vaccine clinics for children 5 to 11 years old to receive their shots Thursday. Gov. Tim Walz said Thursday there were more than 11,000 sites in the state where children ages 5 to 11 would be able to get the Pfizer vaccine, recently given emergency use approval in the age group.
The U.K. approves Merck's COVID-19 antiviral pill, calling it a world first. The antiviral pill that fights COVID-19 in adults with the disease won its first authorization in the world Thursday, as the U.K.'s medical regulator announced that the drug is "safe and effective at reducing the risk of hospitalization and death" in mild to moderate cases.
COVID is still crushing parts of the U.S. For many weeks, declining cases and hospitalizations have offered hope ahead of the holiday season, when Americans travel and spend more time indoors, but progress has stalled recently, with cases rising or plateauing in more than 20 states. | |
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