And while Sunak’s press conference didn’t get the best of reactions from either the public or his political peers, one place he can look to for some words of encouragement (albeit sarcastic ones) is Joe Lycett’s social media account.
Speaking directly to the prime minister, the comedian wrote on X: “Well done hunni, you came across really calm and in control there. Job done.”
In recent history, the former Great British Sewing Bee host has become known for his political commentary, always delivered in his own inimitable style.
People in the UK are being urged to be on the lookout for symptoms of whooping cough, also known as pertussis, which has been sweeping the nation.
Whooping cough is a bacterial infection of the lungs and breathing tubes. It spreads very easily and can sometimes cause serious problems. As a result, it’s important for babies, children and pregnant women to get vaccinated against it.
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There has been a 250% increase in cases of the illness compared to last year, according to Express Healthcare Management.
Earlier this year, the UK Health Security Agency revealed there was a seven-year low in maternal whooping cough vaccination uptake, leaving mothers and newborns at risk of hospitalisation.
With the rise in infections, pregnant women are being urged to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
Professor Beate Kampmann, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told The Sun: “The rise in cases might be because of missed vaccination appointments, possibly during the pandemic.
“Severe disease is almost entirely preventable if the mother is vaccinated in pregnancy and her protective antibodies reach the baby through the placenta and protect until the baby gets its own vaccines.
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“It is therefore important that everyone looks at their vaccination records to check if they might have missed this vaccine, which is given with the routine childhood immunisations and in pregnancy.”
Symptoms of whooping cough
According to the NHS, the first signs of whooping cough are similar to a cold, such as a runny nose and sore throat (a high temperature is uncommon).
After about a week, you or your child:
will get coughing bouts that last for a few minutes and are worse at night
may make a “whoop” sound – a gasp for breath between coughs (although young babies and some adults may not “whoop”)
may have difficulty breathing after a coughing bout and may turn blue or grey (young infants)
may bring up a thick mucus, which can make you vomit
may become very red in the face (more common in adults)
The cough may last for several weeks or even months.
Ask for an urgent GP appointment or get help from NHS 111 if:
your baby is under six months old and has symptoms of whooping cough
you or your child have a very bad cough that is getting worse
you’ve been in contact with someone with whooping cough and you’re pregnant
you or your child has been in contact with someone with whooping cough and have a weakened immune system.
The NHS notes that as this is highly infectious, your GP may prefer a phone call.
Call 999 or go to A&E if:
your or your child’s lips, tongue, face or skin suddenly turn blue or grey (on black or brown skin this may be easier to see on the palms of the hands or the soles of the feet)
you or your child are finding it hard to breathe properly (shallow breathing)
you or your child have chest pain that’s worse when breathing or coughing – this could be a sign of pneumonia
your child is having seizures (fits)
If you think that you or your child may have whooping cough, it’s essential that you speak to your GP.
For babies under six months with whooping cough, there’s an increased chance of problems such as dehydration, breathing difficulties, pneumonia and seizures.
For children and adults, it is less severe but can still cause problems such as sore ribs, hernia, middle ear infections and urinary incontinence.
As we pulled into the parking lot, space No. 8, I tried to tell myself that this was all one big misunderstanding.
“Hopefully this doesn’t take too long,” I told my husband and our chocolate Labrador, Bill. In September 2022, we were still parking outside in an allotted spot and calling the veterinarian’s office to let them know we had arrived before entering the building.
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Bill bounced around as the technician took down his vitals. “There is no way my dog, the one sitting here begging for treats and attention, has cancer,” I thought to myself, almost numb to the questions we were being asked, like if Bill still ate.
“Yes, of course he still eats,” I wanted to scream. “He also still plays and pulls on the leash during walks and barks at anyone he sees on the sidewalk.” But the words were trapped in my throat, tucked beneath my N95 mask.
We found ourselves in the veterinary oncology office after our 6-year-old dog developed a cough. I had taken Bill to his primary veterinarian, fully expecting an antibiotic and a $500 bill. Instead, she told me his lymph nodes were slightly enlarged and she was going to aspirate them “out of an abundance of caution.”
“Sometimes it’s cancer,” she said casually, “But Bill is young and healthy.” Those words would haunt me.
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When the oncologist came into the room, she confirmed what I was wishing against: Bill had B-cell lymphoma, a cancer that’s treatable, but incurable. Left untreated, he had weeks to live. With treatment, we could hopefully get a year or more.
Just three months prior, my husband and I experienced our fourth consecutive pregnancy loss within an 18-month period, coupled with the devastating news we would not be able to have children of our own. A lymphoma diagnosis for one of our dogs felt like a cruel blow from the universe.
During my fourth pregnancy, I spent months in bed fighting for my life and the one inside of me. Bill would curl his body up against my shoulder so I could rest my head against his back. I’d crawl to the bathroom, too weak to walk, and he would follow, resting his head on my feet.
The upside, the doctor told us, is that chemotherapy doesn’t manifest in dogs the same way that it does humans. Because it’s used to preserve quality of life – not be curative – Bill would never know he was sick, he wouldn’t lose his hair, and any mild side effects, like an upset stomach, could be well managed.
“Some lymphoma patients have lived a long time,” she said.
“That will be Bill. He will be the outlier,” I thought to myself.
And so began the fight for Bill’s life – one that I will be forever grateful to have had the opportunity to endure. Choosing to fight Bill’s lymphoma was a privilege, as it comes with a price tag that is simply not feasible for many families, and we are endlessly grateful we had the ability to make that choice. Surely, a dog who had walked through hell alongside us ― including licking tears off my face as I miscarried my third pregnancy on the bathroom floor at home ― deserved to have his paw held through his own battle. For us, there was no Plan B.
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Bill got his first treatment on his seventh birthday. Chemotherapy treatment was new to both my husband and myself. I feel most prepared ― and capable ― when I’m armed with knowledge, so I showed up to Bill’s chemotherapy each week ― always parking in spot No. 8 ― with a list of questions. Our family developed a routine of weekly chemo appointments, and fostered a relationship with his care team that resembled old friends, not medical staff.
After five months, Bill completed his chemotherapy plan, donning a graduation cap, and we cheered in the parking lot as he raced to greet us. We spent two cancer-free months together before the cancer returned. Determined to enjoy more time together as a family, Bill began another chemotherapy protocol that kept us in a state of bliss for more than six months. In some ways, Bill’s lymphoma diagnosis put a dog’s already-too-short lifespan into hyper-focus and left us wondering: How can we make every day his best day?
Photo Courtesy of Kait Hanson
“Bill graduated his first round of chemotherapy with a parking lot celebration, complete with a graduation cap and a small parade with his oncology team in the parking lot.”
Everything about the 13 months we gained thanks to treatment was an intentional effort to savour joy in both big and small moments. My husband and I began taking both of our dogs with us wherever we went, like car rides to get “pup cups” for no other reason than spending time together, and stopping to delight in the ordinary, like crawling into bed as a family of four to watch a movie.
Normally a couple who travels frequently, we opted for things we could do with our dogs instead. We took trips to the beach, where Bill ripped through our rental property covered in sand, a road trip to Kentucky, in which both dogs decided they hated riding in the car and whined for nine hours, and visited plenty of wineries, where Bill always insisted he get the best seat in the house. What may have previously irritated me left me smiling and grateful. I look back on every photo I took during that period (more than 10,000) and I don’t see cancer; I see happiness.
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Photo Courtesy of Kait Hanson
Because the author and her family lived in Hawaii for most of Bill’s life, the beach was his happy place.
On a Friday morning in October 2023, Bill didn’t eat the food I put down. Instead, he looked at the bowl, looked at me, and turned around to go back to bed. I texted his oncologist: “Can you see Bill today?” On the way, Bill enjoyed his head out the window the entire time and even smiled when we pulled into spot 8. Bill loved his oncologists and care team, and whenever we got to the parking lot, no matter how he felt, it was like an internal switch was flipped and he rallied.
Throughout that day, Bill had bloodwork, ultrasounds and internal scans ― all of which came back clean showing normal lymph nodes and organs. “He looks great, all his lymph nodes palpate normally, but something is definitely off,” I remember his doctor saying as Bill rested his head on my feet. But by the end of the day, Bill was eating, wagging his tail, and ready to come home. That night, we enjoyed celebratory crab cakes and Bill, in true form, tried to steal them off our plates.
At 4 a.m. I woke up to the sound of my husband telling me something wasn’t right. Bill hadn’t slept and seemed restless. I flipped on the overhead light and one look told me this wasn’t the same dog who was attempting to eat dinner off a plate last night. We administered fluids into Bill like we’d learned to do from his care team, hoping to perk him up, but it was no use.
“Bud, just tell me what’s wrong,” I whispered into his floppy ears as dawn broke.
Our oncologist met us at the hospital, and after another thorough physical examination where Bill presented normally, we all agreed it would be in his best interest to get some supportive care in the hospital. We walked out of the hospital that morning with only his collar and leash, and it symbolized a reality I wasn’t ready or willing to accept yet.
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“Bill won’t eat for us. I also need to let you know that his white blood cell counts and platelets are tanking,” the ICU doctor told me on the phone the next morning. “We have reason to believe his cancer has moved aggressively to his bones.”
Photo Courtesy of Kait Hanson
Bill and the author’s husband at the hospital
Puzzle pieces in my brain began shifting into place, and I suddenly felt stupid for thinking we had cheated cancer. By that night, we knew one thing for sure: Bill deserved to spend any time he had left with the people he loved most.
We brought him home and got in bed together for what would be the last time. Restless and unable to sleep, a feeling of dread nestled into my stomach. As the sun began to rise, I half hoped my lethargic best friend had done a 180 overnight, and I rubbed his back with an ounce of hope. Instead, he inched to the edge of the bed in an attempt to escape my cuddle smothering.
For more than a year, people had told us that we would know when it “was time” by the look in our dog’s eyes, a fact I had mentally filed in my brain’s “empty platitudes” folder.
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“His eyes are a different colour,” I said to my husband when the morning light finally illuminated our room. I felt like the air was being sucked from my lungs.
That day, we pulled into the same spot that had comforted us for so long, for the last time. So much had changed since the first day we claimed spot 8 more than a year prior, and we walked into the clinic without a phone call, unmasked, and carrying the dog who once plowed through the doors. Alongside my husband and the team that had cared so deeply for him, I kissed Bill’s velvety ears as he took his last breaths.
Photo Courtesy of Kait Hanson
“Even at his darkest moment, Bill was smiling.”
“I feel like an idiot for being so hopeful,” I told one of Bill’s oncologists as she escorted us out of the building through a private backdoor that day.
“Hope is how you get through it,” she replied.
From the outset of his diagnosis, we had promised Bill one thing: When the bad days began to outnumber the good days, we would carry out our final act of love. At the time, we had no idea if that meant an extra month or an extra year. We stopped counting days and instead began counting moments – and we made good on our promise to him in the end without hesitation or regret. I think that was the lesson in all of this, directly from Bill himself: Life is too short not to savour every single moment and make it count.
A team of sustainability scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the journal PLOS ONE that they have developed a community-based framework, founded on extensive local and traditional knowledge, to help assess and respond to the kinds of ecological threats that are widely dispersed across a varied landscape and whose solutions are not immediately obvious. The framework, which was developed to address watershed issues in Honduras’s Lake Yojoa, is widely applicable to a broad range of threats facing ecological commons wherever they may occur around the world.
“One of the biggest issues facing international sustainability efforts is that smaller, less economically developed countries often don’t have the resources to conduct nuanced, in-depth surveys of local people and the local environment in the threatened area,” says Ana Quiñónez Camarillo, a Ph.D. candidate in environmental conservation at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author. “And so environmental organizations often wind up pushing a top-down conservation strategy, which may or may not be acceptable to the local people. If the strategy isn’t acceptable, then it may fail, costing time, money, goodwill and further endangering ecological and social health.”
This is especially true of ecological issues that are widely dispersed, have multiple causes and result in an array of negative effects.
Quiñónez Camarillo and her co-author, UMass Amherst Professor of Environmental Conservation Timothy Randhir, point to Honduras’s Lake Yojoa watershed as an example.
Lake Yojoa is the country’s largest natural lake, and its watershed covers 337 square kilometers of forest and mountains. It is adjacent to two national parks; a major highway runs nearby, and dozens of towns and villages are located within the watershed, some right on the lake’s edge and other tucked up in the mountains. The watershed is rich in biodiversity and has become a popular tourist destination. Aside from tourism, fishing is a major industry, as well as mining and aquaculture.
Many in the region are concerned about water quality, but what water quality looks like depends upon which part of the watershed you are in — and the method of protecting water quality may, on the surface, look like it has nothing to do with water. For instance, in the mountainous highlands, a concern for water quality may mean changing logging or mining practices, since deforestation often leads to silt-filled streams which empty into the lake, which then effect fish and the people who rely upon them for their livelihood. “If you were to tell someone in the mountains, ‘don’t log in this way to protect the fish in the lake,’ it wouldn’t make any sense” says Quiñónez Camarillo.
To help make these connections visible and expedite planning, Quiñónez Camarillo and Randhir adapted a sensitive, flexible and complex framework, called a multiscale ecological framework, to focus on the local perception of threats, consequences and solutions (TCS).
“Academic experts in sustainability all over the world are faced with the challenge of how to use extremely theoretical scientific frameworks to engage the public,” says Randhir, who has been a pioneer in such environmental frameworks. “Our TCS framework makes thinking across multiple scales more approachable for local communities by focusing on the three big areas — threats, consequences and solutions — that are familiar to how people live their daily lives.”
To test the TCS framework, Quiñónez Camarillo and Randhir conducted 224 surveys across 12 communities within the Lake Yojoa watershed, as well as engaging 24 other stakeholders, which ranged from private companies to the National parks and which were selected by the local commonwealth for the Lake Yojoa Watershed, AMUPROLAGO. The surveys were conducted orally in Spanish. The surveys were designed in conjunction with AMUPROLAGO and, in addition to standard demographic questions, focused on threats, consequences and solutions to the loss of forests, wetlands, wildlife, fishing resources, water quality and water quantity.
From the rich data that the researchers collected, they were able to generate a series of detailed tables assessing a wide range of threats, consequences and solutions for the various locales in the Lake Yojoa watershed — grass-roots information which the team hopes will serve as a valuable baseline for conservation and governmental organizations at work in the Lake Yojoa region.
“With the TCS framework,” says Quiñónez Camarillo, we can design better solutions that will be more effective because they are more equitable and acceptable to local people. This framework can help show how big solutions actually affect the things that people really care about at the grass roots.”
This research was supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the Department of Agriculture, the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station, and the National Science Foundation.
