Rebecca Smith

Columbia/Boone County Public Health and Human Services is now offering consultation – and access – to PrEP, or Pre-exposure prophylaxis – a medication that provides protection against HIV infection.

A roundup of headlines from the KBIA Newsroom.

Here's a roundup of headlines from the KBIA Newsroom.

A roundup of regional headlines from the KBIA Newsroom.

Dorreen Rardin and Jackie Reed in Columbia are both long-time nurses who spent their careers working in palliative end-of-life care. After they retired, they joined together to co-found Caring Hearts and Hands of Columbia, a social model home for the dying – basically a community-supposed home for terminally ill people.They spoke about what needs to be done to improve the end of folks’ lives and about what the community could do to help as they work toward creating a social model home.

Reverend Fred Leist and Teressa Gilbreth both work at Missouri United Methodist church in downtown Columbia.They reflected on the past year or so of the coronavirus pandemic, and spoke about how their congregation remained supportive through an emotionally taxing COVID-19 lockdown and how they’re NOW looking forward to rebuilding their community.

Matthew Mertz and Lee Porterfield both live in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and are both veterans who served in the Army for over two decades.They spoke about how all of their children were born in different places and about it can be complicated to find TRICARE, or military health benefits, in some civilian environments – especially rural ones.

According to the ACLU of Missouri, there are currently 15 bills in the Missouri legislature that target the LGBTQ community – many of them targeting…