Recent infections from the Eastern equine encephalitis virus are worrying health officials. Severe cases can be deadly or leave lasting injuries.Residents of 10 communities in Massachusetts have been warned to stay indoors from dusk to dawn. Some local parks are closed at night. A person in New Hampshire has died. Pesticides are being sprayed from trucks and aircrafts.What’s causing all of the alarm? A mosquito-borne virus called Eastern equine encephalitis, which is so rare that most infectious disease experts might never see a case. This year, at least four states have reported human E.E.E. infections.Here’s what you should know.Is this an unusually bad year for E.E.E.?The virus is endemic in North America, which means that it’s consistently present on the continent. The United States sees a handful of infections every year, mainly along the East Coast and around the Great Lakes. In 2019, there were a record 38 cases, the largest U.S. outbreak in recent history.As of Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reported four human cases, in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Vermont. In addition, officials in New Hampshire have reported one death.But experts say it’s too soon to know whether this will turn out to be a particularly severe year. Mosquito-borne illnesses usually spread widely until around October, or when it’s cold enough for water to freeze, said Dr. Jonathan Abraham, a clinical infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School.Until then, health officials in the affected areas are urging residents to take precautions.Who should worry?The main risk factor for contracting the virus is exposure to mosquitoes, said Dr. Cameron Wolfe, a professor of infectious diseases at the Duke University School of Medicine.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 nationwide outbreak that started in May has been connected to eight deaths. The C.D.C. is advising people not to eat any recalled products.Five more people have died after consuming products tainted with listeria that have been linked to Boar’s Head deli meats over the last three weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday, bringing the total number of deaths in a nationwide outbreak to eight.In total, 57 people have been hospitalized because of the bacteria in the outbreak that started in May, the C.D.C. said. As a result of the outbreak, the company has recalled millions of pounds of meat. The recall includes about 70 products — including those made from ham, beef and poultry — that were manufactured at its plant in Jarratt, Va. The recall mostly affects products that are sliced at the deli counter, the company said in a statement on its website.The five new deaths are one person from Florida, one person from Tennessee, one from New Mexico and two people from South Carolina, according to health officials.The numbers make it the largest outbreak of listeriosis since 2011, when at least 13 people in eight states died eating cantaloupe contaminated with listeria.The C.D.C. is warning people not to eat the recalled deli meats. Health officials are telling consumers to check their fridges for any recalled Boar’s Head products. (The C.D.C. is telling people to look for “EST. 12612” or “P-12612” inside the USDA mark of inspection on the product labels. Some of the products have sell-by dates that last until October 2024.)Listeria can live on surfaces, like meat slicers, and foods, even at refrigerated temperatures. Symptoms usually start within one to four weeks after ingesting the bacteria, but can take up to 10 weeks to show up, according to the C.D.C.Mild symptoms of listeriosis include a fever, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. More severe symptoms include headache, a stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance and convulsions, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.Every year, about 1,600 people in the United States develop serious listeria infections, according to the C.D.C. The bacteria are naturally found in soil and can contaminate foods such as dairy products, leafy greens and fruits. Most people who ingest the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes don’t get sick, but certain high-risk individuals, including pregnant women and people who are over 65 or immunocompromised, can become seriously ill.

With his wife, Dr. Jean Carruthers, he conducted hundreds of studies on the wrinkle-erasing properties of the neurotoxin that causes botulism. The work revolutionized beauty care.“Pretty Poison,” newspapers called it in the mid-1990s, when the deadly neurotoxin that causes botulism began to make headlines as a temporary wrinkle-eraser.Botulinum toxin was 100 times more virulent than cyanide. For years beginning in World War II, the Defense Department had hoped to develop it as a chemical weapon. But decades later, when Dr. Alan Scott, an ophthalmologist, refined it into a pharmaceutical after discovering its potential to cure conditions like strabismus (crossed eyes) and blepharospasm (involuntary eyelid twitching and clenching), an unlikely byproduct of his treatments was cosmetic: brows as smooth as a child’s.Yet it was not Dr. Scott who pioneered Botox, as it would later be called, as a panacea for aging. It was Dr. Alastair Carruthers, a Canadian dermatologist, and his wife, Dr. Jean Carruthers, an ophthalmologist, who joined forces to investigate its cosmetic use in hundreds of peer-reviewed studies.While Dr. Scott would come to be known as the “Father of Botox,” the Carrutherses were considered its godparents. Dr. Alastair Carruthers died on Aug. 19 at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was 79.Dr. Carruthers, who had advanced Parkinson’s disease, died with the help of Canada’s medical assistance in dying law, his wife said.Dr. Carruthers, right, with Dr. Alan Scott and his wife, Ruth Scott, in 2009. Dr. Scott, who first refined the botulinum toxin into a pharmaceutical, was known as the “Father of Botox.”via Carruthers familyWe 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.

BBCA woman who used her life savings to have vaginal mesh removed in the United States said she could no longer wait for surgery in Northern Ireland after passing blood and debris.

BBCEngland’s blood donor service has warned blood stocks are still in short supply as it launches a fresh appeal for donors.

The government must ban flavoured and disposable vapes, doctors say, to protect children against a growing epidemic of use in the UK.

The family of a young woman living with severe disabilities say she is still relying on a specialised bed made for her when she was eight years old.

Nigeria has received 10,000 doses of a vaccine to combat mpox, making it the first African country to receive a batch amid the current outbreak of disease that used to be called monkeypox.

For many, Covid is increasingly regarded like the common cold. A scratchy throat and canceled plans bring a bewildering new critique from friends: You shouldn’t have tested.Jason Moyer was days away from a family road trip to visit his parents when his 10-year-old son woke up with a fever and cough.Covid?The prospect threatened to upend the family’s plans.“Six months ago, we would have tested for Covid,” said Mr. Moyer, 41, an academic administrator in Canton, Ohio. This time they did not.Instead, they checked to make sure the boy’s cough was improving and his fever was gone — and then set off for New Jersey, not bothering to tell the grandparents about the incident.In the fifth summer of Covid, cases are surging, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported “high” or “very high” levels of the virus in wastewater in almost every state. The rate of hospitalizations with Covid is nearly twice what it was at this time last summer, and deaths — despite being down almost 75 percent from what they were at the worst of the pandemic — are still double what they were this spring.As children return to schools and Labor Day weekend travel swells, the potential for further spread abounds. But for many like Mr. Moyer, Covid has become so normalized that they no longer see it as a reason to disrupt social, work or travel routines. Test kit sales have plummeted. Isolation after an exposure is increasingly rare. Masks — once a ubiquitous symbol of a Covid surge — are sparse, even in crowded airports, train stations and subways.Human behavior is, of course, the reason that infections are soaring. But at some point, many reason, we need to live.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.

In the early months of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic settled over the country, a psychologist and Harvard lecturer named Richard Weissbourd approached his colleagues with a concept for a new kind of study. Loneliness, or the specter of it, seemed to Weissbourd to be everywhere — in the solitude of quarantine, in the darkened windows of the buildings on campus, in the Zoom squares that had come to serve as his primary conduit to his students. Two years earlier, he read a study from Cigna, the insurance provider, showing that 46 percent of Americans felt sometimes or always alone. In 2019, when Cigna replicated the study, the number of lonely respondents had grown to 52 percent. God knows what the data would say now, Weissbourd thought.Listen to this article, read by James Patrick Cronin“Initially, the idea was, OK, we’ve got a problem that’s not new but is obviously affecting lots of us, and that is now more visible than ever — it’s more present than ever,” Weissbourd told me. “What I really wanted was to get under the hood. Like, what does loneliness feel like to the lonely? What are the potential consequences? And what’s causing it?”Finding answers to these types of questions is a notoriously difficult proposition. Loneliness is a compound or multidimensional emotion: It contains elements of sadness and anxiety, fear and heartache. The experience of it is inherently, intensely subjective, as any chronically lonely person can tell you. A clerk at a crowded grocery store can be wildly lonely, just as a wizened hermit living in a cave can weather solitude in perfect bliss. (If you want to infuriate an expert in loneliness, try confusing the word “isolation” with “loneliness.”) For convenience’ sake, most researchers still use the definition coined nearly three decades ago, in the early 1980s, by the social psychologists Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau, who described loneliness as “a discrepancy between one’s desired and achieved levels of social relations.” Unfortunately, that definition is pretty subjective, too.In order to understand the current crisis, Weissbourd, who serves as the faculty director of Making Caring Common — a Harvard Graduate School of Education project that collects and disseminates research on health and well-being — created a 66-question survey, which would be mailed to approximately 950 recipients around the United States. With the exception of a couple of straightforwardly phrased items — “In the past four weeks, how often have you felt lonely?” — a majority of the queries devised by Weissbourd and the project’s director of research and evaluation, Milena Batanova, approached the issue elliptically, from a variety of angles: “Do you feel like you reach out more to people than they reach out to you?” “Are there people in your life who ask you about your views on things that are important to you?” Or: “Has someone taken more than just a few minutes to ask how you are doing in a way that made you feel they genuinely cared?”Several weeks later, the raw results were sent back to Weissbourd. “Frankly, I was knocked back,” he told me. “People were obviously really, really suffering,” and at a scale that dwarfed other findings on the topic. Thirty-six percent of the respondents reported feeling chronic loneliness in the previous month, with another 37 percent saying they experienced occasional or sporadic loneliness. As Weissbourd and Batanova had hoped, the answers to subsequent questions helped clarify why. Among the cohort identifying as lonely, 46 percent said they reached out to people more than people reached out to them. Nineteen percent said no one outside their family cared about them at all.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.