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To Our OCA Members, Families and Friends

This is a season for us to reflect on the year just ending and look forward to the year ahead. It is a time to enjoy our families and associates in celebration of all that we have to be thankful for.

Twenty-Seventeen has been a fine, progressive year for the Ohio Cemetery Association. Our Spring Conference in Columbus was successful, as was a very well-attended Summer Convention in Cleveland. Members heard some outstanding talks and had a terrific opportunity to engage with one another and our vendor members.

In addition, through the year we have worked to better communicate with membership through such vehicles as the Links Library on our website and the electronic bulletin, OCA Alert. And there is more communication to come on the website and through the Journal and Alert, and possibility of interactive blogs.

Having said this, we wanted you to know the great value you have as a member of OCA, making it the organization what it is, and can be. We dedicate our major mission to serving you and your needs.

We look forward to having Patrick Ebright become our new President in 2018 and Kirk Roberts as Vice President.

Let’s continue the spirit of goodwill, fellowship and success into 2018 and always work together to strengthen our own cemetery organizations and the Ohio Cemetery Association.

We look forward to your participation in the many events scheduled for 2018, beginning with the Awards Night February 17 in Worthington and a new Spring Event, scheduled for April 5 in Piqua. Additional information about these events will come.

Happy New Year to all!

Marilyn Brandt, OCA President 2017

December, 2017



Emergence of Tick-Borne Diseases is Changing How We Use the Outdoors in Ohio

Glen Needham, Ph.D., Associate Professor Emeritus (OSU) of Entomology and Acarology, discusses the changing nature of Ohio.

Read the article Ticks and Tick-Borne Diseases (PDF).

Watch the video Blacklegged Ticks and Ohio Deer.

Glen was on the faculty at OSU for 35 years. His formal education was in entomology, earning a master’s and doctorate from Oklahoma State University where he studied tick salivary gland physiology. He is past president of the Acarological Society of America and co-organizes an annual Acarology Summer Program at OSU (now in its 65th year), which includes a week just on ticks. He is co-author of more than 50 publications on ticks and is co-editor of three books on mites and ticks. He is part of a Zoonotic and Vector Borne Disease Advocacy Group, to raise awareness about arthropod borne diseases in Ohio. He is an active member of the Ohio Public Health Association. Last year he co-organized an Ohio 501(3C) to raise awareness about Lyme and other tick-borne diseases in Ohio and surrounding states. In 2010 he found the first established population of deer ticks in Coshocton County. In June 2014 he co-authored a paper documenting the presence of deer ticks and Lyme disease in Ohio in cooperation with the OSU College of Veterinary Medicine and the Ohio Department of Health. He was recently a contractor for the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where he helped to validate a new test for detection of multiple tick-borne pathogens.

 

Ohio Cemetery Association

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219 Webbshaw Drive
Centerville, OH 45458

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