Health

When it comes to at-home care on the East End, those who need help are finding it, well, hard to find. Factors like long driving distances to reach clients and a perceived lack of competitive wages for aides make the home nursing field challenging to navigate from both perspectives.

East Hampton Town is urging Montauk residents facing difficulties obtaining medicines in the wake of the closing of White's Drug and Department Store to take advantage of its Senior Shopping Assistance Program. Through the town program, people 60 and up can have town employees from the Human Services Department pick up prescriptions from pharmacies and deliver them to their houses.

Covid infections are on the rise again, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control, and doctors and medical professionals here are urging people to remember the lessons learned during the pandemic to keep themselves healthy. 

Fighting Chance of Sag Harbor, in collaboration with the American Cancer Society, has published an updated cancer resource guide that includes details about medical and wellness facilities and practitioners, emergency services “along with a sprinkling of information and practical advice to ease each patient along their journey,” according to a release from the organizations.

Hang tight, Montauk — yes, the White’s Drug and Department Store building has a new owner, but the potential loss of the hamlet’s only pharmacy is not a foregone conclusion. That’s because the building’s new owner is a doctor himself who said he understands why pharmacies are important.

With over 400 blood samples collected from Lyme-infected East Enders since 2014, Dr. George Dempsey of East Hampton Family Medicine is the largest contributor to the Bay Area Lyme Foundation Lyme Disease Biobank, and his samples have helped improve the test that can detect it. The new test could catch it even sooner.

What do Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Ikaria in Greece, Nicoya in Costa Rica, and Loma Linda in California have in common? They are considered by some health experts to be “blue zones” — places where people are living longer lives with fewer health troubles than in the rest of the world. Dr. David Luu thinks Sag Harbor Village is going to be on that list someday soon.

Flu season doesn’t start until after Thanksgiving, right? Wrong. Dr. George Dempsey, the medical director of East Hampton Family Medicine on Pantigo Road, wrote last week to say he’s already had a handful of patients test positive in the office. “Never before last year did we see so many this early,” said Dr. Nadia Persheff, a pediatrician in Southampton.

In recent weeks a deadly bacterium found in warm seawater and in raw seafood has killed at least three people in New York and Connecticut, including a Brookhaven Town resident, and sickened at least one resident of East Hampton Town.

With its new Regional Tick-Borne Disease Center in Hampton Bays officially opening on Monday, Stony Brook Southampton Hospital is hoping to stave off what seems to be a growing epidemic of tick-borne illnesses. 

The Southampton Hospital Foundation announced this week that it will break ground this month on the Stony Brook Medicine East Hampton Satellite Emergency Department next to the East Hampton Healthcare Center on Pantigo Place.

A month ago, the New York Blood Center announced its fifth blood emergency of 2022. “We need 30 to 32 thousand units per month, but we’re collecting between 28 and 31 thousand,” Andrea Cefarelli, the senior vice president of the blood center, said.

The good news that Erica-Lynn and Alex Huberty received was that Mr. Huberty’s cancer — B-cell follicular lymphoma — is not terminal. But wrapped in that was also some bad news on the financial front.

“Probably the most alarming . . . finding was the severity of the mental health needs and experiences of depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts among the L.G.B.T.Q.+ population,” Jennifer Mesiano Higham of Stony Brook University Hospital said of the results of a Stony Brook Medicine survey on the health care experiences and challenges of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ population on Long Island.

Starting this week, East Hampton Town’s Covid-19 testing site at 110 Stephen Hand’s Path in Wainscott, operated by CareONE Concierge, will only be open on Fridays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“Pleasure is our birthright. And it’s great to experience who you are as a person and as a sexual being without being shamed,” said Dr. Lee Phillips, a psychotherapist, sex therapist, and substance abuse counselor with practices in New York City and Virginia, and now Water Mill.

In a move that complicates things for doctors and their patients at the East Hampton Healthcare Foundation facility, radiology services offered at the Stony Brook Southampton Hospital offices there will be halved, and the hospital’s blood lab there will close for a month.

The updated Covid-19 booster shots — which protect against both the original strain of the virus and the now-dominant Omicron subvariants — are already becoming available at pharmacies, physicians’ offices, and other sites.

There is no vaccine to help prevent Lyme disease, which is transmitted through the bite of an infected deer tick, but that may soon change. In early August, the drug company Pfizer announced that it was seeking 6,000 people ages 5 and older to enroll in its phase 3 trial for a new Lyme vaccine. Separately, there's work underway using MRNA vaccine technology to make bites quickly itchy and red, so that they are easily noticed and the ticks can be removed before the transmit disease.

New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday updated the official Covid-19 policies for schools, aligning the state with recommendations from the federal Centers for Disease Control. Notable among the changes is a relaxing of quarantine rules and testing requirements.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Suffolk County had documented 16 cases of monkeypox in total, the second-highest case count in the state outside of New York City. Across the United States there have been just shy of 3,500 cases, including about 1,000 in New York, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Dr. Gregson Pigott, Suffolk County’s health commissioner, said that even though Suffolk’s case count is relatively low, those numbers are expected to increase and the department is watching them with concern.

In the three and a half weeks since Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, signed off on Covid-19 vaccines for children under 5, there has not been a huge demand, according to Dr. Gail Schonfeld of East End Pediatrics in East Hampton.

The lone star tick, which is far more common here than the black-legged tick, does not transmit Lyme disease, nor does it spread the very rare but scary Powassan virus. The good news stops there, though. Lone star ticks transmit ehrlichiosis, heartland disease, tularemia, Bourbon virus disease, and southern tick associated rash illness, or STARI.

Despite a high rate of vaccination, Covid-19 has proven an unrelenting and evolving threat to public health across New York and the country, and highly contagious subvariants of the Omicron variant mean a growing number of people have endured, or will experience, multiple infections, according to an associate professor of public health at Stony Brook University.

Dr. Meera Shah, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood in the Hudson Peconic region, spoke over Zoom this week about her work as an abortion provider, the epic struggle facing her organization, and its fund-raiser in Bridgehampton on June 4, at which she will be a featured speaker.

Despite a significant uptick in Covid-19 cases, including the designation of Suffolk and Nassau Counties as a region now at high risk of virus transmission by the federal Centers for Disease Control, the number of patients admitted at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital has remained in the single digits over the last few weeks — very much manageable, the hospital's chief medical officer has said. "We're going to have to learn how to live with it when community spread goes up like it is now."

In the 20 years since Fighting Chance, the free cancer-counseling charity based in Sag Harbor, opened its doors, the death rate from cancer in the United States has dropped by about 30 percent. That is certainly cause to celebrate, and Fighting Chance is seizing it.

As the seasons shift and we head into the fullness of spring, many people take the opportunity to spend more time outdoors and be more physically active. To avoid injury or discouragement, it's generally best to start small and slowly build up to a fuller exercise routine, rather than start aggressively and then become overwhelmed.

“We are going to continue to be open for the foreseeable future,” said Dr. Jason Cavolina of CareONE Concierge, which provides Covid-19 testing for East Hampton Town at the former Child Development Center of the Hamptons. The decision reflects yet another uptick in transmission of the virus.

East Hampton Town's senior citizens center, on Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton, has been temporarily shuttered following several cases of Covid-19 among program attendees and staff.