She turned her diagnosis into a command to live life passionately, leading to a 12-page New York Times profile and a new career as a public speaker.Geri Taylor, whose openhearted disclosures about the ravages of Alzheimer’s were so striking that they made her a public spokeswoman for people with the disease, died on Aug. 4 in Danbury, Conn. She was 81.The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s, her husband, Jim Taylor, said.Ms. Taylor, a former nurse, brought her profession’s competence, knowledge and frankness to her second career as an activist. She and Mr. Taylor became frequent interviewees in news articles about Alzheimer’s, activists in Washington and lecturers for audiences of patients and researchers. They spoke jointly to more than 15,000 people, Mr. Taylor said.All of that followed from a 21,000-word profile of the Taylors published in The New York Times in 2016 — the product of 20 months of work by the reporter N.R. Kleinfield, a specialist in writing stories about people of little fame but great significance.The “familiar face of Alzheimer’s,” Mr. Kleinfield wrote, was “the withered person with the scrambled mind marooned in a nursing home.” But there was also, he added, something else: “the beginning, the waiting period, which Geri Taylor has been navigating with prudence, grace and hope.”Ms. Taylor with her husband, Jim Taylor, in a cab in Las Vegas in 2014. The Taylors helped found an organization called Voices of Alzheimer’s, which pushes for accessible and improved medical care. Michael Kirby Smith for The New York TimesMs. Taylor first learned she was developing Alzheimer’s in 2012, when she was 69, after she had the uncanny experience of looking in the mirror and not recognizing her own face.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The common pathogen frequently produces the mild symptoms of a cold, but it can cause severe illness and death in babies under 3 months old, health officials say, warning doctors to be vigilant.Over six weeks this spring, 23 children were admitted to a Tennessee hospital for treatment of parechovirus, a common virus that in rare cases can a pose a lethal threat to infants, according to a report released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Twenty-one of the children have recovered without complications, but one was at risk for hearing loss and blood clots, the C.D.C. said, while another child experienced persistent seizures and was expected to suffer from severe developmental delay.The children admitted to the Nashville hospital — Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University — were between 5 days and 3 months old, and their illnesses were detected from April 12 to May 24, the C.D.C. said. The report described the infections as an “unusually large cluster.” Six more cases have been identified at the hospital at other times this year, a “peak in infections” compared with recent years, according to the report.Thirteen of the patients were girls and 10 were boys, and all of them were previously healthy, the C.D.C. said.Not long after this cluster, the C.D.C. alerted doctors this month that the type of parechovirus most associated with serious illness had been circulating nationally since May. It suggested parechovirus as a diagnosis to consider for babies with an unexplained fever or seizures.Parechovirus is so common that most children have been infected with it by the time they reach kindergarten age, and its symptoms include a runny nose and sneezing — what we normally associate with the common cold.But infants under 3 months, and particularly those less than a month old, are at greater risk for severe illness, according to the C.D.C.There is no cure for parechovirus, but diagnoses can still govern how doctors manage the illness.Experts say it is possible that the rise in cases comes from increased socializing after a period of lockdowns during which people were not exposed to common pathogens, which might have weakened their immune systems. But it is also possible that babies are simply being tested for parechovirus more often.“Our ‘eyes’ have gotten better, therefore we are seeing more,” Dr. Kenneth Alexander, chief of infectious diseases at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Florida, told The New York Times this month.

Shunning the New Jersey suburbs in 1969, he set up a pay-what-you-can practice on the blighted Lower East Side and for three decades was a hero to the poor.Joseph Kramer, who tended to the afflictions of the poor as the self-described “country doctor” of Manhattan’s Lower East Side for nearly three decades, a period, beginning in 1969, when the neighborhood was infamous for urban squalor, died on Aug. 30 at his home in Leonia, N.J. He was 96.The death was confirmed by his daughter, Leslie Kramer.In the early 1960s, Dr. Kramer was working as a pediatrician in New Jersey’s prosperous suburbs in Bergen County and seemingly on his way to fulfilling the dreams of his youth — a red Porsche and a getaway in the Bahamas. Yet he began to find work increasingly unfulfilling.“It wasn’t that exciting; nobody was that sick,” he told The Bergen Record in 1990. “Doctors outnumbered diseases. Mothers would call up if their babies had a temperature of 98.9, or they’d ask what color vegetables to serve.” He felt, he later recalled, like “an expensive babysitter.”One night he got a hysterical call and rushed to a patient’s house, only to discover that the crisis had little to do with medicine. He returned home, called his partner and gave away his share of their practice.Dr. Kramer soon began working on the Lower East Side, where he had been born, and in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where he had grown up. He set up his own Lower East Side practice, on Avenue D, in 1969, at one point early on offering his services to a woman with a stroller at a fruit stand. He wound up diagnosing her baby with club foot.Dr. Kramer in his office, where he treated 40 patients on an average day, including prostitutes, priests, bookies and Puerto Rican abuelas. Ken HeymanWhile his roster of patients grew, the neighborhood changed: Flower children and welfare-rights activists gave way to crack dealers and prostitutes. In the parlance of many New Yorkers, Alphabet City’s Avenue A stood for “Aware,” Avenue B for “Beware,” Avenue C for “Caution” and Avenue D — the last street before the East River — for “Death.”“The hippies ended up going to law school or working on Wall Street,” Dr. Kramer told The Bergen Record. “I’m still here.”He saw children with herpes of the brain, active tuberculosis lesions or wounds from being pricked in the park by discarded hypodermic needles. He evolved from a pediatrician into a general practitioner, treating prostitutes, priests, bookies, Puerto Rican abuelas and more.His office was in a converted ground floor apartment in the Jacob Riis housing project, where the living room served as a waiting room for crying babies alongside strung out drug addicts. He would see 40 patients on an average day. Many arrived with relatives who had their own medical problems. A fridge held the medicine. Kitchen cabinets stored medical files.He often accompanied patients to the pharmacy across the street and paid for their medicine, knowing they could not afford the drugs he prescribed. When one man with scoliosis lost his unemployment checks, Dr. Kramer paid for his treatments for three months.In 1983, a profile of him in New York magazine by Bernard Lefkowitz and a segment about Dr. Kramer on “60 Minutes” prompted a wave of news coverage depicting him as a lonely Sisyphus fighting urban decay. “On Avenue D, disease is not an isolated phenomenon,” Mr. Lefkowitz wrote. “It’s part of the social pathology of the neighborhood.”Twice while the “60 Minutes” correspondent Harry Reasoner interviewed Dr. Kramer on the street, someone came along and interrupted them. “There wouldn’t be no neighborhood without him,” one patient said.The New York Times described Dr. Kramer running a “pay-what-you-can-afford solo practice,” noting that he was the only private doctor in the 10009 ZIP code with hospital privileges.Dr. Kramer in 1996, the year he closed his practice. “It wasn’t the rise of AIDS, the spread of TB, the resurgence of measles,” The Associated Press wrote in explaining his quitting. “It wasn’t his 71 years, and it wasn’t the money. It was the paperwork.”Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesFrom under a bristling mustache he spoke in a Jewish street patois — hard-boiled sarcasm, loud cursing and, among friends, banter bordering on insult. Standing next to the children he cared for, Dr. Kramer, a broad-chested 6-foot-5, seemed a giant.Nicknames captured his intensity and good will. To a fellow doctor, he was “the Last Angry Man”; to a longtime patient, he was “the Guardian Angel of Avenue D”; and to the cartoonist Stan Mack, who depicted Dr. Kramer several times in Real Life Funnies, his weekly comic column for The Village Voice, he was “Dr. Quixote.”Joseph Isaac Kramer was born on Dec. 7, 1924. His parents, Selig and Frieda (Reiner) Kramer, ran Kramer’s Bake Shop in Williamsburg. Joe would pitch in as a cashier — resentfully. Sent out to run the occasional errand, he took breaks to do what he really wanted — play stickball.He earned a diploma at Boys High School in Brooklyn, graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1949 from the University of Kentucky, then left for Europe to find an affordable medical school that would accept Jews. He graduated from the University of Mainz, in Germany, around 1960. In 1963, he married Joan Glassman shortly after they had been introduced by friends.Dr. Kramer’s Lower East Side practice lacked a nurse, leaving him to devote hours each day, and every weekend, to filling out forms. In one instance, he requested $19 from Medicaid after spending 10 hours helping a suicidal young patient and got only $11. Continually enraged by what he saw as the stinginess and inaccessibility of the American medical system, he developed severe hypertension.He quit the practice in 1996, occasioning a final wave of attention from the news media. “It wasn’t the rise of AIDS, the spread of TB, the resurgence of measles,” The Associated Press wrote in explaining his departure. “It wasn’t his 71 years, and it wasn’t the money. It was the paperwork.”In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife; a son, Adam; and two grandchildren.Every August, Dr. Kramer attended a reunion of Lower East Side old-timers at East River Park. In a phone interview, Tamara Smith, a patient of his when she was a little girl, recalled hundreds of people swarming around Dr. Kramer as he entered the park for one such gathering — confirmation of his legacy as a “country doctor” who had treated generations of families.“He couldn’t even get off the ramp to get into the park,” Ms. Smith said. “He was every child in the ’hood’s doctor. I don’t know how he managed that, but he saw every one of us.”