(Story courtesy of WVLT)

Knoxville, TN (WVLT) -While the leading cause of death in men is heart disease, the second is prostate cancer. With September being National Prostate Awareness Month, Eddie Check is working to raise awareness.

Eddie Check is a non-profit organization based out of Knoxville that works to educate East Tennessee men on the importance of regular testing for prostate cancer.

A PSA test is a simple blood test that checks PSA levels in the blood. If the PSA is elevated, it could indicate that something is wrong with the prostate.

Every year, Eddie Check partners with MEDIC Regional Blood Center to host events across East Tennessee for men to get free testing and donate blood for MEDIC.

“Men don’t have to donate blood to MEDIC to get the PSA test, but we hope that they do because that also saves lives,” Eddie Check founder Kevin Kirkland said. “So really the blood donation can save up to three lives and the PSA test can save theirs.”

Last year, the event allowed for more than 700 men to get tested and 600 pints of blood donated.

While HIPAA makes it difficult to get an exact number, Kirkland said the testing they do has already saved dozens of lives.

Kirkland founded Eddie Check because of his father Eddie who passed due to prostate cancer.

“[Back then,] once you found out you had prostate cancer, normally it was too late,” Kirkland said. “He died within two years of that fact that he found out he had prostate cancer. I always told myself when I had the means and the wherewithal I would do an event that would help men with understanding prostate health and prostate cancer and the fact that it’s really not a death sentence.”

Eddie Check is hosting their annual event on Sept. 12 and 13 across East Tennessee. Locations for the event can be found here.

(Story courtesy of WVLT)

Knoxville, TN Millions of dollars in federal funding is headed to Knoxville, aimed at improving a stretch of Chapman Highway.

The money is coming from the Biden administration’s Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) program, a pool of more than $1 billion for grants to local governments who are improving roads.

Knoxville’s receiving $17.8 million in funding to improve one of the city’s most-used thoroughfares through its own project: SAFER Knoxville 2.0. Specifically, the three-phase project will focus on the stretch from Blount Avenue to Woodlawn Pike.

“We’re doing significant improvements at Augusta quarry which is a really popular place. We’re doing a lot of improvements to urban wilderness and connectivity, we want people to move around in ways other than cars if that’s something they’re interested in and that invitation rings a lot truer when they can do so safely,” Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon said.

According to state data, Chapman Highway saw 33 deadly or serious crashes from January of 2022 to July of 2024. Of those, seven were deadly (with eight total deaths) and 59 people were injured. Also, seven of those crashes, including four of the deadly ones, involved pedestrians.

That’s what the city is hoping to reduce. According to federal documentation on the funding, SAFER Knoxville 2.0 will focus on “high speeds, drivers failing to yield to people walking and biking and inconsistent pedestrian facilities.”

“By 2040 we want to have zero people die on the streets of Knoxville, every single person who dies on our streets or walking on our streets is an avoidable death, in my view, and we cannot rely on individuals to fix that,” Kincannon said.

So what will that look like? The same documents said the city is looking to build a sidewalk on the west side of Chapman Highway, install new pedestrian signals at intersections and throw in a median.

Not all the money for SAFER Knoxville 2.0 is coming from SS4A, however. The City of Knoxville is planning on contributing the rest, bringing the total cost of the project to $22,250,000.

Knoxville wasn’t the only group getting funding in East Tennessee, either. Fentress County, Dandridge and Knoxville’s Community Development Corporation are also on the list.