Health

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.