Mason, an associate director of the comedy, which opened on Broadway last week, will step in as Patti LuPone’s counterpart.On Thursday, Mia Farrow celebrated opening night of “The Roommate,” the new Broadway play in which she is starring opposite Patti LuPone. On Saturday, Farrow was homebound after testing positive for Covid.The production canceled both of its scheduled Saturday performances, and on Sunday planned to go forward with Marsha Mason in Farrow’s stead. Mason, best known as an actor, is one of the play’s associate directors and had been working with Farrow on her performance.The play’s producers asked Mason to fill in for Farrow, according to the show’s spokesman, Rick Miramontez. Mason will be performing with the show’s script in hand, Miramontez said.Farrow, 79, posted on X Saturday about her “first Covid bout,” but then deleted the post.The show has an understudy, Carol Halstead, but apparently opted to go with Mason, who is far better known, and whose own name recognition might help stanch cancellations by ticketholders hoping to see Farrow. In the years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been several previous instances in which directors have stepped in for absent performers on Broadway.Farrow, LuPone, Mason, and the show’s director, Jack O’Brien, all have homes in Western Connecticut and are friendly with one another.“The Roommate” is a comedic two-character play, written by Jen Silverman, about what happens when an Iowa City woman takes on a boarder from the Bronx who turns out to have a fondness for fraud.The play, capitalized for $5.5 million, is among the first in a string of shows this season that are hoping the combination of big name stars and short runs will lead to high ticket demand.

BBCThe number of people taking ADHD medication is at a record high – and the NHS is feeling the strain as it tries to diagnose and treat the condition.

The NHS is urging parents and carers of two and three-year-olds to schedule a flu vaccine for their children ahead of an expected surge in respiratory illnesses this winter.

Some treatments and procedures become routine despite lacking strong evidence to show that they’re beneficial. Recent studies have called a few into question.An older patient with dementia is in the hospital and has trouble swallowing. A speech pathologist recommends thickening the liquids the patient drinks with starch or gum and specifies how viscous her tea, water or juice should be. Should it resemble honey? Or apricot nectar?A doctor writes the order, and the discharged patient returns to her home or nursing facility. She may be drinking thickened liquids from then on.The rationale is that this sludgy stuff prevents patients from drawing liquids into their lungs and from developing aspiration pneumonia. But does the practice work? Some geriatricians have doubted it for years.Now, a large-scale study from the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y., has found that liquid thickening doesn’t actually help such patients.This happens with some frequency: Medical practices so commonplace they rarely raise eyebrows turn out, after further investigation, to have scant basis in fact.“There are plenty of things we do in medicine that have no evidence,” said Dr. Matthieu Legrand, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor at the University of California, San Francisco.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.

Parents’ stress has become a public health concern, the U.S. surgeon general warned.In his recent advisory on parents’ mental health, the United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek M. Murthy, said out loud what many parents might have only furtively admitted: Parenting today is too hard and stressful.Of course, there have always been concerns about families’ well-being. And while some of today’s parents’ fears are newer — cellphones, school shootings, fentanyl — parents have always worried about their children.So why has parental stress risen to the level of a rare surgeon general’s warning about an urgent public health issue — putting it in the same category as cigarettes and AIDS?It’s because today’s parents face something different and more demanding: the expectation that they spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children. These pressures, researchers say, are driven in part by fears about the modern-day economy — that if parents don’t equip their children with every possible advantage, their children could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life.This parenting style is known as intensive parenting, as the sociologist Sharon Hays described it in the late 1990s. It involves “painstakingly and methodically cultivating children’s talents, academics and futures through everyday interactions and activities,” the sociologists Melissa Milkie and Kei Nomaguchi have written.But we may have reached a point, the surgeon general and other experts suggest, where intensive parenting has become too intense for parents.

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.

A close contact of someone with bird flu became ill on the same day, the C.D.C. reported. But the second person was not tested, and the cause of the illness is unknown.Someone who lived with a Missouri resident infected with bird flu also became ill on the same day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday.The disclosure raises the possibility that the virus, H5N1, spread from one person to another, experts said, in what would be the first known instance in the United States.On Friday night, C.D.C. officials said that there was “no epidemiological evidence at this time to support person-to-person transmission of H5N1,” but that additional research was needed.The coincidental timing of the illnesses, especially outside flu season, concerned independent experts. H5N1 has been known to spread between close contacts, including those living in the same household.And neither the initial patient nor the household contact had any known exposure to the virus via animals or raw milk.Neither patient has been identified, and details are scant. The household contact was not tested, so officials cannot be sure that the individual actually was infected with the bird flu virus.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 decision is a crucial step in getting shots to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the center of the outbreak.The World Health Organization has given its authorization to a first vaccine to protect against mpox, a decision announced in such haste on Friday that it caught even the head of the company that makes the vaccine by surprise.The vaccine, made by the Danish company Bavarian Nordic, has been approved by the regulatory authorities in Europe as well as the United States and other high-income countries since a global mpox outbreak in 2022. But low- and middle-income countries rely on the W.H.O., through a process called prequalification, to determine which drugs, vaccines and health technologies are safe and efficient uses of limited health funding, and the organization had declined to act until now.The W.H.O. had come under increasing criticism for declaring a global public health emergency for mpox last month without giving a vaccine that prequalification stamp of approval, or a more provisional form of approval called emergency use authorization. Bavarian Nordic first submitted its safety and effectiveness data on the vaccine, called Jynneos, to the W.H.O. in 2023. The W.H.O. had defended its slow pace of review, saying that it needed to subject the vaccine to careful study because it, and two others that have been used to protect against mpox, were originally designed as smallpox immunizations, and because delivering it in low-resource settings such as Central Africa would involve factors different from those relating to its use in high-income countries.But on Friday morning, the W.H.O. suddenly said it was authorizing the shot.“This first prequalification of a vaccine against mpox is an important step in our fight against the disease, both in the context of the current outbreaks in Africa, and in future,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O. director general, said in a statement.Paul Chaplin, Bavarian Nordic’s chief executive, said he was among the many who had been caught off guard.“We’ve got there eventually — I don’t know quite how,” he said. “But it’s good news. It’s going to make the regulatory pathway much easier.”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.

PAOnline adverts for junk food will not be allowed from next year under new government rules introduced to tackle childhood obesity.

The company said that the site would close indefinitely and that it would permanently stop making liverwurst. Union officials said the plant’s 500 workers would be given severance and offered relocation.Boar’s Head announced on Friday that it would indefinitely shut down the troubled Virginia deli meat plant that has been tied to a deadly listeria outbreak.The company also said it had identified liverwurst processing as the source of contamination and would permanently discontinue the product.Federal inspectors had repeatedly found health and sanitation violations at the plant in Jarratt, Va., with an extensive review two years ago by inspectors who said it posed an “imminent threat” to food safety. That finding could have resulted in a warning letter or even a suspension of production there, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture did not take strict measures and allowed the plant to stay open.In July, Boar’s Head began recalling its lunch meats after health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to trace hospitalizations that now number 57, as well as nine deaths of people 70 and older, back to the meats produced at the site. It paused production at the plant in late July. “Given the seriousness of the outbreak, and the fact that it originated at Jarratt, we have made the difficult decision to indefinitely close this location,” the company said in a statement posted Friday.Jonathan Williams, communications director for the union that represents about 500 workers at the plant, said the company was providing severance packages and relocation to the employees.Mr. Williams, of the United Food & Commercial Workers Local 400 union, said the company gave employees the option to continue to work at the other Virginia processing center that the company operates or to transfer to others. Boar’s Head runs facilities in Michigan, Indiana, New York and Arkansas.New Agriculture Department records released by the company on Friday show that inspectors deemed the company’s methods to control listeria inadequate after taking swabs of various pieces of equipment on July 24.The inspectors concluded that “product may have been prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions, whereby product may have become contaminated with filth,” in a notice delivered to the company on July 31.The company said it would appoint a new safety council of veteran food safety experts and hire a new chief food safety and quality assurance officer who will report directly to the company president.

Getty ImagesThe first “citizens’ jury” on assisted dying in England has backed a change in the law to allow people who are terminally ill to end their life.