The City Council met on March 4, 2026, for a regular meeting that included a proclamation for Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Week, public comments from Republic Services and a Disability Awareness Month advocate, approval of several resolutions, two quasi-judicial hearings, and a land exchange. The meeting lasted approximately two hours and included unanimous votes on most items.
Tonight is to raise awareness for MS through MS Week, MS month, and quite frankly, most of us try to raise awareness and advocate for it twelve months out of the year. Um raising awareness, um emphasizing the understanding of what multiple sclerosis is. So uh when you see people that might have the disease in the community, you understand better what it was or what it is. I know when I was diagnosed, I had to look it up. I didn't know what it was, and I'd been a paramedic for 20-something years. So that's the opportunity that we have during MS Awareness Week is just to bring education to the forefront, and Dr. Bosanoff will uh do that for us here in just a minute. From a personal perspective, I just like to share a couple things. Uh when adversity enters your life, whether it's a medical condition or something other. Uh I know personally I had to search for something that made sense with it all, or find a reason to uh help me accept why this had to happen to me, or just simply grab onto something positive to help you move forward with it. Um advocating for this disease is just that it's a positive thing. Uh I have some friends in here that advocate for this every day with fundraisers and walks and golf tournaments, and I think that's what helps us move forward with this um this disease in today's world. Um my personal MS diagnosis came in 2019. It was life-changing for me and my family, but it also brought some very unexpected blessings into my life. Um, and those are the people that I believe if I wouldn't have been diagnosed with MS, I never would have crossed paths with them. And they're some of the most remarkable, amazing people that I've ever met in my life. And some of them are here tonight, and you're gonna get to meet one special one here in just a second. Um the team at Kooteny Health is far more than just care providers for MS patients, but they're they're trusted and they become close friends. And I I I consider them extended family for myself, and I know that the folks that are here tonight with me and in the MS community, I'm echoing the same feeling for them. So at this time, I is my privilege to introduce you to an amazing person who has been just instrumental in the care and support of MS patients in this region since 2020, Dr. Nina Bosanov from Kootenia. I'll pull your slides up for you. Thank you all so much for having me here this evening. We won't take up too much more of your time, but thank you for the recognition and this opportunity. Uh so again, my name is Dr. Nina Bajanov. I'm one of the only two multiple sclerosis fellowship trained neurologists in the state of Idaho. The other one is in Boise, so we obviously have to care for a wide uh range of our population that's living with multiple sclerosis. Uh so just uh a couple of things to overview about multiple sclerosis, and maybe some of you are familiar with this. It is a chronic autoimmune condition. It can impact the optic nerve, the brain or the spinal cord. And essentially what it is, it's a disruption of the communication between the body and the brain. And so one of the challenges with multiple sclerosis is the symptoms can be very different based on where the lesions can occur. So someone may have blindness, they may be in a wheelchair, they may just have cognitive changes or fatigue. And so the approach really has to be individualized as we think about multiple sclerosis. So it is a lifelong condition. Right now, we do not have a cure for multiple sclerosis because we don't really fully know the cause. But we do have treatments that can significantly improve quality of life as well as disability. So what is the impact? So as you mentioned, uh over a million people are living with multiple sclerosis. A global diagnosis is made every five minutes. As we talked about before, it can cause varying symptoms, and that's one of the reasons it can be so challenging to make a diagnosis, is because people may not realize that their symptoms might be from something like MS. Most people get a diagnosis diagnosis between the ages of 20 and 50, but we know that there are pediatric people with MS, uh, as well as older adults as well. Uh there is progress and hope, which is the great part of things, and it's one of the reasons I love giving MS care. So over the past two decades, we have more than 20 FTA-approved multiple sclerosis disease modifying therapies, and they can really prevent these attacks of MS and then hopefully prevent disability by preventing the attacks. So the time of diagnosis is incredibly critical. So the earlier we can make a diagnosis, the faster we can get people on treatment, uh, and then hopefully stabilize their disease course. Um what what do we know about MS, especially here? So it's interesting if you look at the prevalence of MS, as we can see in this map of the US, uh, those dark blue states such as Idaho have higher prevalence rates than many of the other areas in the country. Um, and there's still a lot of work being done in this area to understand why that might be.