Texas adds one more measles case, state health department says
May 16 (Reuters) - The Texas health department reported 718 cases of measles in the state on Friday, one additional case since its last update on Tuesday, marking the lowest increase since the outbreak began in February.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
14 minutes ago
- BBC News
'Life, amidst death, has to continue': Molly Jong-Fast on her new book and watching her mother fade away
BBC Special Correspondent Katty Kay chats with author Molly Jong-Fast about her memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, which tackles the life, legacy, and decline of her mother, Erica Jong. The death of a mother or father is one of the things we don't talk about much in modern life, maybe because it scares us. But it's a universal reality. Nearly all of us will go through it at some point. Molly Jong-Fast is a political commentator and writer for Vanity Fair who has just written a new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother. The book is Jong-Fast's account of her mother and feminist author Erica Jong's descent into dementia, which began the same year that Jong-Fast's husband, professor Matthew Adlai Greenfield, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. The book is an honest, emotional and at times funny account of how Jong-Fast got through that horrible time. Not only was she handling her mother's cognitive decline, Jong-Fast's stepfather was diagnosed with Parkinson's, the world was dealing with Covid and everyone in her orbit was under one roof, including an elderly dog with his own health problems. These are heavy topics, but we found moments of laughter, too, emblematic of Jong-Fast's style. In her memoir, the author explores lying to her children about their father's health, referring to a growth on his pancreas as a "mass", because, "a 'mass' could be anything – a group of people, a group of blood vessels, a group of cockapoos meeting in Central Park for a cockapoo meetup". I really enjoyed this conversation. Her lessons about handling loss and grief, facing the legacy of her mother's fame and the difficult decisions that come with ageing parents are things I think we can all learn from. Watch (or read) more of our discussion below. Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. Katty Kay: When my mum died, I remember thinking that I've had training up the wazoo for everything in my life, but nobody's given me the guidebook for this. Nobody's said, as your parents get older, they're going to need their diapers changed or that you're going to need to think about the money – let alone anybody helping you with all of the emotions. I'm so glad you wrote this book to help people, but why is it that we've gotten to this position where something that almost everybody goes through, we're left kind of clueless when it comes to it? Molly Jong-Fast: I think there's a lot of shame about getting older. It's why I talk about being sober all the time; I want to destigmatise alcoholism and that's how I feel about this to a certain extent. People don't want to talk about it. People don't want to get older. It's really scary. It only goes one direction and you can't get off. You don't get to skip birthdays. It's just this endless march towards death and nobody knows what happens after you die. What I think was so interesting about this whole experience was that it gets you into this conversation of: Why are we here? What is the point of all of this? Why are we on this planet and what should we be trying to grab from this human experience before it's too late? KK: Having now gone through the last few years and written this book, do you feel like you have lessons to impart? MJF: Because I got sober at 19, I saw the incredible benefit of being able to look at my experience and show it to other people. I got that if you can go through something and share that experience with someone else, they can be helped by it. It's almost Jungian; there's a collective suffering that can be shared and lessened. The thing that I always try to say, especially with my kids, is to not feel bad about stuff. The rest of the world can make you feel bad, OK? But don't make yourself feel bad about things. The other thing I say to people is to just do the best you can. This is not going to look the way you want it to look. Maybe it will! And that's great, too. But just because things don't look the way you want them to doesn't mean it's not the way it's supposed to look. KK: I think some people looking at what you went through would think 'I couldn't bear that.' But you have lovely moments in the book where you write about taking the kids on spring break because it's spring break. And you have to buy groceries and you have to pick them up from college. And that life – amidst death – has to continue. MJF: There's this funny moment, I don't know if this made it into the book, but my husband and I had this thing where his father died and then, two weeks later, my stepfather's sister died – and we were at the same, very small funeral home in Connecticut. And the people who own the funeral home come up to us and they're like [makes a shocked face]. We saw that it was very dark – it was not a great year – but we saw the humour in it. I do think the wonderful thing – and I think you see this in much worse stories of people who are in camps or the stories of people who are in wars – is that your focus becomes very narrow and everything becomes a binary. You either can do this or you can do that. And there's something very clarifying about the binary, which I don't think is a bad thing. KK: You start in the book by saying you have this incredibly intense relationship with your mother and you're part of her and she's part of you. But it becomes pretty clear that the relationship is complicated and not as close as you had wanted it to be and that your mother had incredibly narcissistic tendencies when you were growing up. I think that, for so many people who go through this process, that makes what you have written even more important, because so many people don't have that loving, easy relationship with their parents, and when that moment comes they feel a terrible sense of guilt. MJF: I would guess that, on average, people have worse relationships with their parents than we think they do. Our generation is just going through this period with these parents who we're losing and there is a sense when I talk to these people that they feel guilty. They're sort of stuck and feeling bad. And I definitely felt guilty. I put this in the book, but my husband's shrink says, 'Sometimes, when you have narcissistic parents, you feel worse that it didn't work out.' KK: What did you feel guilty about when your mother started to get dementia and you made the decision to move her into a home? MJF: In my ideal world, my mother would not be an alcoholic and I would move her into my house and she'd be painting and writing poetry and maybe [be] a little dotty. But she'd live in my house. So, I felt very bad. It was not how I wanted it to go. But I also felt that my feeling bad was a useful thing for people to see. I'm not just doing this because I'm an exhibitionist. I'm doing it because I really do think that when you have a relationship that isn't what you want and then you suffer from it, you don't have to. And I'm saying, 'I did it and you don't have to,' is sort of the goal. –-
Reuters
40 minutes ago
- Reuters
US health chief Kennedy names new members to vaccine advisory committee
WASHINGTON, June 11 (Reuters) - U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday announced new members to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel of vaccine experts, days after he said he fired all 17 of its members. The new members are: Joseph R. Hibbeln, Martin Kulldorff, Retsef Levi, Robert W. Malone, Cody Meissner, James Pagano, Vicky Pebsworth and Michael A. Ross. "All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense," Kennedy said in a post on X.
Daily Mail
44 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Shocking marriage secrets of Alabama chiropractor, 36, on trial for 'poisoning wife, 25, in bid for life insurance payout'
An Alabama chiropractor's wife who has accused her husband of trying to poison her has testified that the first few years of their marriage were 'rough.' Hannah Mann, 25, gave evidence on Tuesday that her marriage to Brian Thomas Mann was 'isolating' and the first few years were a struggle for the couple, who only dated for six months before tying the knot. Brian Mann is charged with her attempted murder after it was alleged he continually poisoned her with lead inside their marital home in Decatur. He has pleaded not guilty. 'The first year and a half I would say was pretty rough,' she said of their marriage, according to The Decatur Daily. 'We had a lot of things to overcome, but it progressively got better as time went on. We had a couple of bumps in the road.' She remembered her marriage to Brian, 36, getting better after the birth of their first child in January 2020, but not even a year later, she began to fall ill. Hannah also testified that her husband began poisoning her in 2021, causing her to develop 'severe abdominal pain and really severe back pain and extreme nausea.' By August 2021, she began feeling ill and got an X-ray in October, where doctors found a glitter-like substance inside her. 'They took an X-ray of me, and it showed a bunch of glitter in my stomach,' she told the court. However, she wasn't immediately diagnosed with lead poisoning. She was during a follow-up visit, which after, her husband began to discourage her from seeking medical help, she testified. 'He would say they would send me right back home if I went to the doctor,' she said. By November 2021, she began experiencing dizzy spells. By the end of the year, she had lost 50 pounds, she testified, saying she weighed around 100 pounds then. The mother-of-two also claimed her husband isolated her - forcing her to get rid of all her social media accounts when they married in 2018 and discouraged her mother from coming over while she was ill. Her mother would sneak over while Brian was out, Hannah testified. The main group of people she'd be around while she was allegedly being poisoned was her husband's family and her church family, she said. Brian's alleged plan to cash out on the multimillion life insurance policies he had for his wife began to unravel after she was diagnosed with lead poisoning. She was hospitalized between January and March 2022. It was in late January that the now-Hartselle Police Chief Alan McDearmond received a call from Department of Human Resources that Hannah had been poisoned and encouraged the police to place Brian under arrest, he testified. When they arrived at his residence, he wasn't home, according to his mom and grandmother. 'I talked to them about what had happened and asked if Brian was there. They said he wasn't,' he testified. When the husband later arrived at the home, he spoke with McDearmond, who asked if there was anything in the home that could have contained lead. 'Brian said Hannah took white powder, which was the generic form of Miralax, and from there we went back to the Police Department,' he said. Brian later called him from the hospital, where a nurse practitioner told the officer that another nurse at a different hospital had diagnosed the father-of-two with the same thing she did. An X-ray showed a substance in his stomach that he had recently digested. Police later took samples from Hannah's colostomy bag after getting a subpoena. It is unclear what police found. Just days after she left the hospital, Hannah dropped her bombshell accusation of attempted murder and filed for divorce. She detailed the $1.3million in life insurance policies he held against her and another $1.5million in two additional insurance applications that were denied. She amended her complaint days later, saying Brian 'perpetrated acts of assault upon her person … by intentionally causing her to unwittingly ingest particles of lead.' In late August 2022, Mann was indicted and on September 2 of that year he was arrested for attempted murder. He was released on $500,000 bond on September 7, 2022 with the conditions that he turn in his guns, wear an ankle monitor and give up his passport. A week later, however, Mann had his bond revoked because he allegedly did not give away his passport. In late November, Mann's father filed an affidavit asking his son to be released and promising he wouldn't flee the country.
