In this inaugural "Nurse News" mini‑episode of the Club Nurse podcast, host Colton Lord delivers a rapid‑fire roundup of recent headlines that intersect nursing, pop culture, and public health. He begins by announcing that cardiac nurse Amaya, a Bronx‑based nurse featured on Love Island Season 7, won the reality‑TV competition and the $100,000 prize, highlighting the public‑vote element and celebrating fellow nurse‑contestant Nick. Lord then shifts to a scientific breakthrough from Melbourne, Australia: researchers used mRNA‑based methods to make hidden HIV reservoirs visible inside white‑blood cells, a step that could eventually enable therapies that eradicate the virus. He explains the basic biology of HIV latency, the role of antiretroviral therapy, and why exposing reservoirs matters for a cure. Next, Lord reports a rare case of pneumonic plague in Flagstaff, Arizona, where a patient died despite emergency care, noting the region’s historical plague activity, typical rodent‑flea transmission, early symptoms, and the importance of prompt antibiotic treatment. Finally, he covers a tragic assisted‑living facility fire in Fall River, Massachusetts that claimed nine lives, while also emphasizing the massive community response of firefighters and police. Throughout, Lord encourages listeners to stay informed via nurse.org, shares his social handles, and closes with a call to share the episode and care for oneself. The episode blends celebratory pop‑culture news, hopeful scientific progress, urgent public‑health alerts, and a somber community tragedy, all framed for a nursing audience.
Welcome to Club Nurse. I'm Colton Lord, your host. By you being here today, it shows me that you are someone who wants to learn, grow, laugh, connect, and just let your emotions flow. We are here to share real stories and hear real life experiences from real people. You are not alone in this, and Club Nurse is here to show you that. Don't forget to follow the show and share today's episode with someone you love. Now let's dive into today's conversation.
Welcome everybody to Club Nurse. It is Colton Lord, your host of this podcast. And this is going to be a segment that we, like we've talked about, we've been in the works with how exactly to do these mini episodes and what we wanna produce and offer to the audience that's listening. And I'm really excited to announce that we are starting this Nurse News segment where I am going to be bringing you the most up-to-date and breaking news in healthcare and nursing and stories that I think you are going to find either interesting, educational, or valuable. To your life and your practice. Some of the stories are just fun pop culture type of stories. Some are like scientific breakthroughs or just things that are happening in the nursing world as far as anything that you can imagine. Nurse.org posts so many articles about news and things that are happening in current events and ways to stay up to date and in the know on things. And these are important, especially as Nurses and people working in healthcare as professionals, I believe it is important to be educated and to know what is going on because you never know when these types of situations could affect you. And even if they don't directly affect you right now, they may be affecting your peers, people around you, your patients, people of other specialties in the healthcare community. So without further ado, let's get into it. Uh, this is a huge spoiler alert on Love Island. So if you have not finished season 7, I would skip through the next couple minutes because I don't want to spoil it for you. And I I will just be totally upfront with you. I do not watch Love Island, or I have not. I don't know, maybe I need to go catch up. Season 7, we have some really awesome and exciting news. Nurse Amaya has won. I did go back and watch some clips on TikTok of Nurse Amaya winning. Super awesome. She's from the Bronx. She won season 7. The couple captured viewers' hearts with their late-season connection and genuine chemistry, ultimately securing the $100,000 prize. Like, are you kidding? And the coolest part about it is it was a public vote. Amaya is a cardiac nurse from the Bronx, and Brian is a model. They bonded over their shared Latino heritage and mutual support throughout the show's dramatic twists. Their victory was announced by host Ariana Madix during the live finale on July 13th, marking a triumphant end to a season filled with emotional highs and unforgettable moments. I mean, that makes me want to go watch it. And I've heard so many things, all the tea, like on social media throughout the season, but I just, I just have not watched. Okay. I don't have a whole lot of time. And when I do have free time, I'm not usually watching reality TV. Although I'm not against it, and maybe I need to. But I also wanted to give a little shout out to our boy Nick. He was the male in the runner-up couple on the season from Florida. So nurses showed up, the voting showed up for the nurses. Congrats to, first off, Amaya, and then also congrats to Nick. That's awesome. I am so happy that Amaya won the $100,000 prize because, I mean, hello, how long does that take for a nurse in— well, I guess she's in New York, so she probably does make that or more in a year. But for our buddy Nick, that you know that's gonna take him about two years to make $100,000. Just kidding. Shout out to all of our Florida nurses. We love you, and I hope that you have a real nursing license and didn't go to one of those fake universities. We know who you are. We see you. Okay, next up. This is a really, really, really, really, really cool story, and near and dear to my heart in the gay community is this came out of. Melbourne. This was initially found in The Guardian. I'm talking about Melbourne, Australia, and you can also find the story on nurse.org/news where this article is also going to be posted. But breakthrough in search for HIV cure leaves researchers overwhelmed. The Melbourne team demonstrates ways to make the virus visible within white blood cells, paving the way to fully clear it from the body. So a little backstory on HIV, a little educational moment. When the body's infected with HIV, the reason that it's not curable is because the virus hides in little reservoirs, makes little reservoirs in the body. So it may be in your eyes, your spleen, anywhere in the body. There's little reservoirs of the virus. So when a person is infected with HIV and they are taking their daily medications, because once you have the virus, in order to keep the virus suppressed and to not transmit it to anybody else and to not develop AIDS, you have to take a daily pill, uh, antiretroviral therapy in order to suppress the virus. And the reason that that is not curable, because that will keep, that will keep it at bay and that will keep you non-transmittable and undetectable in the blood, in semen, and other bodily secretions. But the reason that it's not curable is because of those little reservoirs that are hiding in the body. And with this new research coming out of Melbourne, they have found a way to expose those little reservoirs. And this is based on mRNA technology, which came to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic when it was used in vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech. So this is amazing. Again, these are, these are beginnings. Uh, they— this was just like groundbreaking research that they had found. It does not mean that there is a cure. That does not mean that there is any medication drug out there to cure HIV. But this is really great as far as research goes and a step in the right direction, because if those— if the little— those little reservoirs are being exposed, then they are trying to find ways to where they can then give a medication that does kill the virus. And the hopes is That, that will eliminate the virus from people's bodies who are living with HIV, which is huge. Globally, there are almost 40 million people living with HIV, and they might— like I said, they must take medication for the rest of their lives in order to suppress the virus and ensure that they don't develop symptoms or transmit it. I love science. Go research. This is great. This is a win for the gay community, and I know it's not just the gays that have HIV, but it is huge. HIV/AIDS is huge in the gay community, so This was groundbreaking research. I'm super excited about it. I can't wait to kind of follow along and see how that goes. I am realizing that I chose a couple headlines that were near and dear to my heart this week. I don't know if any of you heard about the patient in Arizona who died of the pneumonic plague after arriving at Flagstaff Medical Center, which is my alma mater, Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Shout out Lumberjacks. So this person showed up to Flagstaff Medical Center's emergency department with severe symptoms, and despite appropriate initial management and attempts to provide life-saving resuscitation, the patient did end up dying the same day, according to Northern Arizona Healthcare officials. Before this, the last reported plague death in the US was in 2021, and the last in Coconino County in Arizona was in 2007. Most of these cases do occur in rural areas of the western United States, particularly in northern Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. Prompt antibiotic treatment is highly effective, which is why fatalities are now a little bit less common. They did report that there was a notable die-off of prairie dogs near Flagstaff, which often is an early warning sign that the plague is active in the area because prairie dogs and other rodents do frequently carry the infected fleas that transmit the disease. To humans through bites, and let's just talk about some symptoms. That way, if you are in that area or you start having these symptoms, it's a little bit of an early warning sign that maybe you need to go get checked out. So early symptoms of the plague are sudden onset of fever, headaches, chills, weakness, and painful lymph nodes. Pneumonic plague specifically presents with severe respiratory symptoms, including cough, chest pain, and difficulty breathing. Treatment protocols typically involve aggressive antibiotic therapy with streptomycin, gentamicin, doxycycline, and ciprofloxacin. The CDC does note that survival rates are significantly higher when antibiotics are administered within the first 24 hours of symptom onset. So that is so important to get care if those symptoms come on suddenly, and especially if you're in those areas, just go get checked out. What's the worst thing that's gonna happen? They're gonna turn you away and say that you're fine, do some tests, you're okay. Uh, I think I would rather show up and just get checked out. I know that that's a lot of times when we have those kind of symptoms, we just brush 'em off, but I think that they're pretty severe. All right. And to round out this first segment of Nurse News on Club Nurse, I have a story that is very sad. Another one that a lot of these stories this week were just, I guess, very close to my heart because this is a story right here in Massachusetts. I live in Boston. I actually live in Cambridge, which is right across the Charles River from Boston, if you don't know, but where Harvard is.
Hello.
Shout out Harvard Crimson Red, I think. I think that's their mascot. I don't really know. Um, but yeah, the story is very sad. Um, the headline reads, 9 dead in Massachusetts assisted living facility fire described as unfathomable tragedy. Uh, 9 people died Sunday night after an assisted living facility caught fire in Fall River, Massachusetts. Elderly residents begged for help from first responders as smoke poured out of the building and blackened the hallways they tried to use for their escape. I mean, this part I found To at least be a little glimmer of hope and shining light in the story was that more than 50 firefighters, including 30 who were off duty, joined the rescue effort after the automatic alarm system was triggered. So Fall River Fire Chief Jeffrey Bacon added that every police officer in the city was there too. Everybody was rescuing people. And that's amazing. That is just proof of a community coming together to help, very similar to what happened with the tragedies in Texas with the floods. When these tragedies strike, you really see the communities that come together and that people just show up being good humans, being kind, and giving what they can to their community. The Massachusetts State Police were on site overnight. They were waiting for an official report as the cause of the disaster. We do not know exactly what caused the fire. There were multiple injuries in this. So like I said, 9 people had died. I think there were about 30 people reported taken by ambulance to nearby hospitals. Fall River is in southern Massachusetts, so some of those patients were taken To Rhode Island Hospital, reportedly. All right. Thank you, Club Nurse. That wraps up our first news nurse news segment. Uh, there will be more episodes like this where we are sharing the most up-to-date stories and headlines that are happening in the nurse and healthcare world. Uh, you can find more information at nurse.org/news for the most up-to-date and breaking news in the nurse and healthcare world. So thank you so much for being here. Again, my name is Colton Lord. You can find me @coltonallenlord on Instagram, and that is where I am posting most of my content. And thank you for being here. This is Club Nurse. We'll see you later. Bye. From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to thank you for being here at Club Nurse.
I hope you gained something valuable from today's episode. And if you did, remember to share this episode with someone that you love. Follow me on socials @NurseDaddies or @ColtonLord17, and be sure to follow nurse.org to stay informed with all of the hottest healthcare topics. Until next time, take care of yourself the way you take care of everyone else. Love ya. Bye.
