HOLSTEIN, Iowa (AP) – A former transportation director of a northwest Iowa school district has been given two years of probation for tampering with bus records.  The Sioux City Journal says 52-year-old Douglas Wessling was sentenced on Tuesday. The judge also ordered Wessling to pay a $1,000 civil penalty. Wessling had pleaded guilty.

Wessling was put on leave last fall and then lost his job as transportation director for the Galva-Holstein Community School District after an investigation by the Iowa State Patrol. District Superintendent Dave Kwikkel has said three district buses were taken out of service because of damage. Kwikkel said Wessling put one of them back into use before it had been repaired. Authorities say he also falsified repair records on at least three buses.

A new report shows 62-thousand (62,000) Iowans have Alzheimer’s Disease and that number is expected to grow to 73,000 in just over a decade. Carol Sipfle, executive director of the Alzheimer’s Association of Greater Iowa, says the annual report has more disturbing facts about the disease’s impact in the state. “We have the third highest death rate from Alzheimer’s Disease in the country. I think that’s pretty startling,” Sipfle says. “In Iowa, it’s the fifth leading cause of death, while nationally it’s the sixth leading cause of death.”

Iowa has one of highest percentages of residents 65 and older in the country, but Sipfle is quick to point out that Alzheimer’s isn’t just a disease that strikes the elderly. Sipfle says the disease remains widely misunderstood, as many people mistakenly believe it’s simply about memory loss. “It’s so much more than just memory loss, it’s something that kills people,” Sipfle says. “As the brain deteriorates from Alzheimer’s Disease, yes, people do lose their memory, but it impacts their personality, their ability to think, it has a physical impact, and ultimately people will die either from Alzheimer’s Disease or with Alzheimer’s Disease.”

The report from the Alzheimer’s Association (2014 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures) features information about how the disease impacts primarily women. Sipfle is calling on the federal government to invest in Alzheimer’s research as heavily as it does breast cancer. “You know, women are afraid of breast cancer, and rightly so, but what this report tells us is that by the time women are in their 60s, they’re almost twice as likely to get Alzheimer’s as they are to get breast cancer,” Sipfle said.

The report states a woman’s estimated lifetime risk of developing Alzheimer’s at age 65 is 1 in 6, compared with nearly 1 in 11 for a man. For more information:  www.alz.org/greateriowa.

(Radio Iowa)

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — Woodbury County in western Iowa has approved repair plans for part of a two-lane highway that will eventually be widened. The county board agreed Tuesday to grade part of U.S. Highway 20 in 2016. The paving process will close the road west of Correctionville, and is part of a bigger plan to widen a 12-mile section of the two-lane roadway.

The Sioux City Journal reports the plans will require a detour onto eight miles of County Road D22, also known as Old Highway 20. That county road will be widened and repaired in 2015 in preparation for the extra traffic. The state Department of Transportation says the current widening project, between two miles east of Moville through Correctionville, is scheduled to be completed in 2017.

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