You’ve got a stomach bug which won’t leave you alone? This could be the parasitic cyclosporiasis that can cause weeks of diarrhea, cramps, and bloating.
The infection is more common during summer, however several states have reported an increase in cases compared to what would be expected at this time of the year.
Michigan has reported 681 cases since June 22. This indicates an outbreak of the same source. Many nearby states have also seen an unusual increase.
Ohio has reported 177 cases of cyclosporiasis since the start of this year. 171 were in June and most occurred after June 20.
New York State has reported 112 cases of syphilis this year, outside New York City. 107 have been reported since May 1st.
There are also cases reported in other states, although it is unclear if they are connected.
There are investigations underway to determine what could be the cause of outbreaks, possibly in other states as well. However, it is likely that progress will take a while.
“Cyclospora, that’s a strange one”
Cyclosporiasis is difficult to isolate to one source. This is according to Dr. Max Teplitski. He was the former chief of the Division of Food Safety for the US Department of Agriculture, and now is the Chief Science Officer of the International Fresh Produce Association.
Teplitski co-chaired a committee of advisors that was tasked with investigating why outbreaks of cyclospora have been steadily increasing in the United States over the past few years.
He said, “Cyclospora can be a strange disease.”
Scientists can read or sequence the DNA of some pathogens that cause food and water contamination, such as E. coli or Salmonella. This allows them to compare a strain causing illness with a different strain. Scientists often detect outbreaks of foodborne illnesses by matching genes.
PulseNet, a national network of laboratories for surveillance that sequences bacteria to make them sick in real time. Scientists know that if the DNA fingerprints of multiple cases from different states match, they should look for an underlying cause.
The only reason that gene matching works is because the genetics are very stable as they move from one person or food source to another. Their instructions are written the same each time so that they can be tracked.
Cyclospora does not work like that.
Teplitski explained that because these parasites are sexual (more about this in a moment) and exchange pieces of DNA when reproducing, the offspring they produce share the genes between their male and their female part. This means the genes will look different each generation, and it is nearly impossible to trace the lineage.
Without molecular tests to help guide an investigation, the only way to solve an outbreak is through shoe-leather detectivework done by epidemiologists. They follow up on each individual who has been confirmed as having a cyclospora. The epidemiologists ask detailed questions regarding what and when the person was sick. Because people don’t always remember what they ate for breakfast, sometimes they use data taken from credit card receipts or grocery receipts to fill in any gaps. This is a tedious task.
These questionnaires tend to be centered around food. Teplitski hopes that investigators will also look at sources of water, such as lakes and waterparks.
We hope they will ask the patients about their recreational activities. He said, “What about exposures to other well water types?” All of them are different sources of parasites.
What is the cause of cyclosporiasis?
The parasite that causes cyclosporiasis, a one-celled organism spread by human excrement, is a single cell. It is spread by contaminated water or food, which can be acquired when people are swimming or eating raw fruits and vegetables.
Common sources include berries, fresh herbs and other produce that’s hard to clean thoroughly. Also, swimming pools, lakes and splash pads, and waterparks are common.
The foods most often associated with outbreaks of E. coli in the US since the 1990s are:
The intestines are the setting for a movie worthy of “Alien”.
They first differentiate between male and female, then have sex, and finally reproduce. All of this occurs in the gut. The oocysts or eggs burrow through the wall of the intestine, where they kill cells. They are then shed into the surrounding environment by poop.
They mature and grow outside of the body during warm weather for several weeks, before they can infect another person.
People don’t usually spread the parasite because the spores take time to develop outside of the body. The transmission is usually indirect.
What are the symptoms cyclosporiasis?
According to Dr. Rebecca Schein of Michigan State University Health Sciences, the symptoms associated with a cyclospora are “a bit different” from those seen in Salmonella and E. coli.
She said that sometimes people get a high temperature, but this is not very common.
It’s more diarrhea. Schein explained that if you have diarrhea more than three times per day, it can leave you feeling bloated and full. It’s like eating Thanksgiving dinner every day.
This stomach bug can last for several weeks, even in healthy individuals.
Schein explained that if you had a healthy immune system it would eventually disappear, though it may take up to six weeks. The symptoms can also come and go.
Symptoms can persist in people with compromised immune systems.
Schein says that in these cases “the symptoms won’t go away until it is treated.”
What is the diagnosis of cyclosporiasis?
When doctors want to find out the source of an upset stomach, they check the patient’s stool using a multiplex lab test. This is a test which looks at multiple pathogens simultaneously.
Cyclospora does not appear on these panels.
Schein explained that “it can be missed easily if the test is not done correctly.” The doctors must order a specific test that uses a stain to turn the eggs bright orange or pink so that they can be seen through a microscope.
In May, the Texas Department of State Health Services published a health alert warning that doctors might need to perform up to three tests separated by 24 hours to accurately diagnose the condition.
What is the treatment for cyclosporiasis?
Schein says that once the infection is diagnosed, it’s relatively easy to treat.
A combination antibiotic called Trimethoprim-sulfa is used to treat the parasite. It is available under brands like Bactrim or Septra. The course usually lasts seven to ten days. However, people with reduced immune systems may have to continue taking it longer.
Schein explained that an antibiotic interferes with Cyclospora’s ability to utilize folate as energy. The antibiotic also works against some types of other parasites.
Schein says that if diarrhea has lasted more than five or three days, it is important to be tested.
She said that treating cyclosporiasis is important because the disease can be so uncomfortable and can spread to other people and into the environment.
Is it possible to get rid of the cyclospora if you wash your fruits and vegetables?
In 2021, researchers in Norway investigated this question by contaminating raspberries and blueberries with three types of parasites, including cyclospora and cryptosporidium. They then washed them three times.
First, put the berries into a strainer. Then run them through plain water under a faucet for one minute. Second, fill a salad spinner up with water. Immerse the berries in it for one minute and stir them manually before spinning and draining them. The third step involved mixing one part vinegar and three parts water in a large bowl that could cover the berries. They then stirred it by hand, for one minute.
The learned some things. The smooth surface of blueberries was much easier to clean than the slightly bumpy, fuzzy raspberries. This helps explain why raspberry tops the list of food associated with outbreaks.
A second curious fact was the extra stickiness of cyclospora. The Cryptosporidium eggs were harder to remove from raspberries than the Giardia and Cryptosporidium.
The vinegar water rinse removed more parasites from the raspberries compared to rinsing with plain water. The vinegar water rinse was slightly more efficient than using a salad spinner, but not enough to have a noticeable difference.
Both the salad spinner method and the vinegar method were effective in removing most of the eggs, however, some remained on the fruit. It’s unclear if the remaining cyclospora eggs would make someone sick.
Bottom line: Always wash your produce to avoid any nasty bugs that may be stowing away in your home.

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Sedentary behaviors, such as watching TV, sitting down, and scrolling endlessly on our couches, are common.
The modern day culture encourages a lot of sitting. According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 25% of American adults do not get enough movement during their free time.
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Sedentary living is well known to increase cardiovascular risk and decrease muscle mass. But new research from the United Kingdom has found that it also increases the likelihood of developing cancer or dying of cancer.
A recent study published in PLOS Medicine examined the link between long-term sitting and cancer risk and death due to cancer. The researchers found that those who moved or exercised while sitting had a reduced risk of dying from cancer.
The study found that those who spent an hour of physical activity (walking at a slower pace or washing the dishes) to break up their sedentary times had a 12% lower risk of cancer-related death. The risk of dying from cancer was reduced by 12% for those who did an hour or more of light intensity physical activity, such as walking at a slow pace or doing a chore like washing dishes (yes, even the mundane tasks count!
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The rate of death from cancer was 8% lower for those who substituted 30 minutes of sitting with moderate exercise, such as walking 3-4 miles an hour. For people who replace just 5 minutes with vigorous activity (such a brisk walk), the rate fell by 22%.
“Just get up. “That is the message,” said Dr. Heidi Prather of Hospital for Special Surgery in New York’s Lifestyle Medicine Program, founder and medical Director. Prather has no affiliation with the study.
The data show that we are all glued to our computers, cars, or other devices that keep us sedentary. But, if you interrupt that by doing any kind of physical activity, the results can be very positive. Prather said that the data showed not only cancer deaths, but also increased risk for developing cancer.
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The researchers analyzed data collected from 91 292 adults wearing wrist trackers over a seven-day period to measure their level of physical activity as well as the time spent sitting down.
The study participants were followed up for an average of 12,38 years in order to track cancer diagnoses and deaths related to cancer.
The researchers divided sedentary behaviors into two types: interrupted sedentary behaviour, or sedentary activity that was less than 30 mins long and interrupted with movement.
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The risk for certain types of cancer, such as breast, colorectal and thyroid cancers and liver cancer, was higher in those with a high rate of prolonged sedentary behaviour.
This study has some limitations. While it is important to break up the time you spend sitting, there are other ways that can be done. The study’s authors stated in a press statement that the Biobank participants have higher levels of physical activity than the U.K. general population.
Exercise can reduce the inflammation of the body and the likelihood of developing cancer.
Prather says that 60% of the risk of certain types of cancer (such as colorectal, breast and prostate cancer) are genetic. However, 40% is due to factors such as lifestyle, diet, sleeping, stress, relationship, social connection, and use of dangerous substances.
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Prather said that “[these things] together cause us to risk chronic systemic inflammation, chronic diseases and cancer.”
Obesity can be caused by sedentary living, and obesity is a factor in several types of cancer.
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Even if you exercise regularly, it’s still important to aim for more movement.
It’s not possible for all people to follow a daily exercise routine. Even if you don’t go for long runs, or sign up for Zumba class every week, any movement is good for your health.
Prather said that it doesn’t need to be so restrictive. She said that movement could include parking farther away from the supermarket, using the stairs rather than the elevator, or getting off the train a stop earlier to walk the extra two blocks.
Prather stated that any amount is valuable.
Start with something that you would not even consider a goal. Make it easy.
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You could set yourself the goal of getting out and going for a 10 minute walk after every lunch. Maybe it is to take the stairs at work instead of using the elevator. Maybe you’re taking a 10 minute scroll break in order to clean the counters. It doesn’t matter what your goal is, because everyone will have a different way of moving.
You are not excused from the “move more prescription” even if go to gym before working every morning. You need to move more if you spend long periods sitting at your desk or couch.
Prather told the audience: “Move, get up because it’s important to break up long periods of inactivity,” he said. It was clear that prolonged inactivity is as dangerous as not working out.
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You can also take a few standing breaks during the day or a daily walk to keep your muscles and blood moving.

Then came his sobering warning on social media: “Still not a five-alarm fire, but an escalation.”
Faust tells me later he wrote the newsletter and Threads post before coming to work, scheduling them to publish after his shift began. Such multitasking is part of a typical day for Faust, 47, who also publishes peer-reviewed research, serves as editor in chief of a medical news site, teaches at Harvard, raises two young daughters with his wife in Cambridge, appears frequently on CNN and other outlets, and, many evenings, conducts the Longwood Chorus, a 100-person ensemble of medical workers and scientists.
“He’s a Renaissance-type guy,” says Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and presidential adviser for several administrations. Fauci became a mentor to Faust after discovering Inside Medicine, which he reads regularly. The newsletter, Fauci says, is an antidote to hot takes and misinformation online. “He’s very thoughtful and careful. He doesn’t just blast out against something; he gives it a fair evaluation and makes a helpful and useful comment. So he’s emerging as one of the most respected of the medical public health commentators.”
At a time when many working scientists are unwilling or afraid to publicly take on the Trump administration, or have been ordered not to by their employers and universities, Faust has used his Substack to condemn what he’s called a “public health blitzkrieg” — mass layoffs of federal health workers, grant cancellations, and anti-vaccination policies. But his forays into reporting have caused consternation among some of the journalists he competes with, who question whether he follows the same rules and standards they do.
He is unabashed about wanting to be the first to report news in his field and build his public profile. But hours spent shadowing him over the course of a month — at work, home, and in his musical endeavors — reveal other qualities that drive him: a restless curiosity, hunger to make a difference, and refusal to accept the boundaries others think should define his role.
It’s a unique mix that has propelled Faust to become one of the most important medical voices in a city full of them. And he has no intention of letting up.
Not long after his story about the MV Hondius posted, Faust, clad in a white N95 mask and pale blue scrubs, is standing at the bedside of Brian Johnson, the patient who came in with shortness of breath. Faust, a stethoscope notably missing from his neck, rests his hands on the bed rail and watches him closely.
Sitting up, Johnson tells Faust he feels better but is still a little wheezy.
“My feeling is, if you’re still feeling wheezy, I don’t need to listen to your lungs, I need to give you more treatments,” says Faust, who’s written that he finds stethoscopes mostly superfluous — medical tests, his observations, and a patient’s own words usually reveal just as much. “I believe what you’re telling me, because you’ve had this condition for a long time.”
A willingness to defy convention is one of Faust’s trademarks. By his own design, his path in medicine has been unorthodox.
Growing up in San Francisco, Faust — whose mother is a retired school librarian and father a tax lawyer-turned-investment adviser — was drawn first to music, teaching himself piano early in grade school. He was writing music by age 9, joining the prestigious San Francisco Boys Chorus soon after.
To this day, he remembers the first time he heard the chorus rehearse with an orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony. “It’s so incredibly powerful… When you catch that feeling, you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna catch that high again.’”
Faust’s interest in medicine took hold around the eighth grade, when a friend’s father, a physician, brought them into an operating room to observe a Whipple, a complex procedure in which doctors remove cancerous tumors from the abdomen. Despite the blood, he realized he was intrigued — not repulsed — by the idea of cutting into people to make them better.
By then, Faust understood that an office job like his father’s was not for him. “I had, like, massive ADHD, but I didn’t realize it,” he says. He wasn’t diagnosed until his late 20s.
As an undergrad at Williams College in Western Massachusetts, Faust majored in music while pursuing a pre-med track. He later earned a master’s in music theory and composition at the University of California, Davis, where he wrote dozens of short pieces, including string quartets and choral music. “I wanted to reach a certain point in music, so that when I returned to it — if I could return to it later — it was at a higher level,” he recalls.
Toward the end of Faust’s second year at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, a more experienced colleague told him over drinks that specializing in emergency medicine, with its predictable shifts, would allow him to further his medical career while pursuing other interests.
“There are very few professions where you can make a huge difference in people’s lives, and then go home and do something else and not get paged,” he says.
“Here’s the problem,” Faust is saying as he stands in a hallway with a resident, discussing a patient with back pain and tingling in his right foot. “Why am I gonna argue against that? Why am I arguing in favor of an MRI?”
Tilting his head and smiling, he waits for the junior doctor’s response. The resident, reading from notes on his cellphone, had said earlier that the person did not have any “red flag symptoms” that could signal a life-threatening condition.
He now hazards a guess: “The new foot finding?”
Faust agrees and goes a step further. It’s not the pain or tingling, he explains, but specifically the new weakness in the foot. “New neuro-weakness is actually a red flag, technically,” he says.
Then, like a coach huddling with a player, he pivots to boost the resident’s confidence.
“You gave me the information,” Faust says, adding that it’s his own job as physician to connect the dots. “He actually does have indication for [an MRI]. Got it? Cool.” Then he claps his hands together. “Good talk.”
Faust applies his skills as an educator and communicator to his writing, which began to take shape more than a decade ago. As a resident doctor in New York, he started pitching stories to an industry magazine and was eventually given a regular column.
“Once I learned enough about medicine to have something interesting to say, the part of my mind that likes to create things like music or think of ideas started merging with this medical knowledge,” he says.
Some columns were irreverent, while others told humbling personal stories, such as the one about a neighbor who had died of alcoholism, leaving Faust to wonder what more he could have done. He started pitching stories toSlate, and wrote more than 50 pieces for the online magazine between 2014 and 2024.
Around the time he began publishing, Faust reconnected on a dating app with a high school classmate, Kate Taylor, who’d become a New York Times reporter. He recalls talking with Taylor and her colleagues at cocktail parties, trying to “apprentice myself” to learn how they took a story idea and turned it into polished writing. The couple married in 2016 and later moved to Boston for Faust’s position at Brigham and Women’s, which is now part of Mass General Brigham.
In the spring of 2020, with cases of COVID-19 mounting, Faust and two residents launched a two-page newsletter to help doctors, journalists, and the public keep up with the storm of new research, policy changes, and other developments.
Virtually overnight, it gained around 20,000 followers, later prompting Facebook to offer Faust a deal to launch a project on its newsletter platform, Bulletin — marking the birth of Inside Medicine. The new income allowed Faust to cut his clinical work to around half-time.
In late 2022, after Facebook folded Bulletin, Faust moved to Substack. Today, he says college-educated general readers make up the majority of his audience, though medical and science professionals subscribe, too. And while some content is kept behind a paywall, he says most of his stories — those he deems important for the public to know about — are free for anyone to read.
Like many health journalists, I learned about Faust during the pandemic. I found his newsletter informative and thought-provoking, analyzing data in ways that cast new light on public health problems. One post from January 2023, for example, disproved with simple graphics the claim that COVID deaths were being massively overcounted.
When I moved to Boston from Dallas four years ago, I reached out to him to learn more about his work, hoping he’d become a source. He did, but once Trump took office again in January 2025, Faust became a competitor, too.
The prospect of a second Trump term had many in Boston’s medical and scientific community on edge over the radical changes to federal health agencies proposed in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint to remake the government. Some of these fears were confirmed when the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., began freezing grants, planning a radical restructuring, and muzzling and firing employees.
Faust got to work, breaking stories about DOGE layoffs, publishing leaked documents, and securing exclusives including one pointing out an apparent leadership vacuum at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a story cited by a US senator during an oversight hearing.
Drawing on his expertise — and his anger, as a member of the community he felt was under attack — Faust covered America’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, and told the personal stories of some who had been fired from the CDC.
One such staffer, a single mother who had helped the CDC prepare for and respond to emergencies including bird flu and Hurricane Helene, had received top performance reviews until a termination notice arrived in her inbox telling her she was “not fit for continued employment.”
In his Substack post, Faust opined that the “administration’s actions have real effects on real people, and they will diminish important work that keeps all of us safe.”
He added that he’d asked the interviewee if he could set up a GoFundMe campaign on her behalf. She declined because she feared retribution, even with anonymity. According to Faust, she was eventually reinstated to her job and still works there.
Faust’s journalistic efforts make him an outlier in academic medicine, where promotion is typically based on one’s ability to attract grants and publish studies in top journals — not break news stories. Still, he does find time to publish research on public health and epidemiology, despite not holding a degree in either one.
“He’s sort of, like, this gem,” says Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and prominent health outcomes researcher at the Yale School of Medicine and another of Faust’s mentors. “He had all these ideas but was not someone who had gone through a traditional research pathway.”
The two connected in early 2020 when Faust reached out to Krumholz for a Slate column about Bernie Sanders, after the Vermont senator suffered a heart attack during the Democratic primary race.
Faust wanted to explain how doctors evaluate patients’ risks for a second life-threatening event after they recover from a first one. His takeaway: Sanders, because he’d made a good recovery, was healthy enough to continue his campaign and govern but that, especially in what he called the “age of the geriatric presidency,” candidates should be expected to release more complete medical records.
Soon, Krumholz and Faust were discussing the pandemic and plotting new research questions to tackle together.
They conducted a series of studies on the pandemic’s excess deaths — how many more people died in the overall population than would be expected based on historical trends. They argued this was a more comprehensive and objective way of measuring COVID mortality than looking at data from death certificates, because it avoids controversies over how deaths are classified and coded.
They then broke down excess deaths by state and demographic group and found that states with lax pandemic protocols, including lower vaccination rates, suffered higher mortality rates than those with stricter policies.
On his own, Faust has explored other public health questions, including whether Kennedy’s promotion of an unproven link between Tylenol use in pregnancy and autism in children caused a drop in the drug’s use by pregnant women (it did).
On the day of my visit to the Brigham, Faust tells me he had recently exchanged messages and phone calls with Tedros Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. Ghebreyesus had helped him confirm information for a story about the hantavirus for the medical news site MedPage Today, for which Faust serves as editor in chief.
“He called me twice in one day,” Faust says. “It was great to hear his voice.”
Usha Lee McFarling, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, likens Faust to physician-writers such as Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande, and says his inroads with leading experts strengthen his reporting.
“He’s a really important voice, because he’s a physician at a very influential hospital system and medical school, and he is using that voice in a way that’s very loud and unafraid,” says McFarling, a former national science correspondent for the Globe’s sister publication, STAT, adding that he may be speaking for many who are reluctant to speak out.
Some science reporters, however, have grumbled that Faust is “playing journalist,” pointing to his liberal use of terms such as “scoop” and “exclusive.” (In at least one case, he had to partially walk back his claim he was first to report a news story.) They also wonder whether his insider perspective — and being an employee of a major health care system — could pose conflicts of interest and blur the line between reporting and advocacy.
I talked about his writing with Kelly McBride, senior vice president and chair of The Poynter Institute’s Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership.
“He has a classic case of competing loyalties,” McBride says. “He has his loyalty to his audience, which is what he seems to be serving, but also to his profession and colleagues who are also his sources.” She adds that Inside Medicine would benefit from an expanded mission statement that explains its purpose, ethics, and what he does to put his audience first.
Faust, however, insists he is independent, can write on any subject he chooses, and would criticize people he considers friends if he saw reason to, though he concedes it would be more difficult. He points out that he got to know Ghebreyesus after criticizing the WHO on CNBC in the early days of the pandemic.
“No matter how hard you try, journalism and advocacy are always intertwining,” Faust says, “and I think that some traditional media go to great lengths either to avoid that or to obscure that. I think that in 2026 it’s increasingly OK for those lines to… be overtly blurred.”
In an age where most Americans get some news from influencers or independent creators, there may be more tolerance for blurred lines than in the past, says Chris Roberts, a journalism professor at the University of Alabama and vice chair of the ethics committee of the Society of Professional Journalists. The SPJ, he says, is rewriting its code of ethics for the first time in more than a decade to reflect this landscape.
Regardless of who is reporting the news, the main standards remain fairness, accuracy, independence, seeking truth, minimizing harm, and being transparent, Roberts says. But he adds: “Nothing in the First Amendment says you have to have any objectivity at all.”
Faust puts it this way: “If I saw you doing CPR successfully, I would say, ‘Good job.’ I wouldn’t say, ‘Why are you trying to play doctor?’ I think gatekeeping is stupid.”
On a spring evening, Faust rushes into a cavernous Brookline church, a tote bag hanging off one shoulder. He sets the bag down, climbs atop a small podium, and greets the 110-plus members of the Longwood Chorus, an all-volunteer group made up of doctors, nurses, care coordinators, statisticians — a diverse slice of Boston’s medical and scientific community.
They’re here to rehearse for an upcoming concert to mark the country’s 250th anniversary. Curated by Faust, the program spans Native American songs, Colonial music, spirituals, modern American music, and an arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that Faust pieced together from two other versions.
“Ya, ya, ya, ya, ya!” they sing in a warm-up.
“Tee, tee, tee, tee, tee!”
Faust runs them through portions of the 11 pieces they will perform, perfecting their diction, at points prompting one section to sing a bit louder, another softer.
Afterward, Faust, wearing a dark blazer over an untucked white shirt and trousers, sits in the church’s nave. He tells me his brain feels “fizzy.”
“How I feel after these rehearsals is more energized and engaged than with anything else I do. It is like running four codes at once — one for each section [of the chorus],” he says, referring to the hospital alert when a patient needs resuscitation.
He knows he won’t be able to sleep when he gets home. So after the rehearsal lets out around 9:15 p.m., he sits down and plays the church’s Steinway for about an hour.
Last summer, he returned to playing piano regularly and taking weekly lessons to help displace his “doomscrolling” and cope with feelings of burnout. At home, he has only an electronic keyboard, and anyway, it would be too late for him to practice without waking his daughters.
Two days before the concert, Faust is sitting at a cafe overlooking Harvard Square, his mind fizzy again — this time about the hantavirus outbreak. He’s been texting with colleagues and parleying on social media about how big a threat this outbreak might be and how far it could spread.
“This week will definitely be one of the most memorable weeks of my career,” he predicts.
In the coming days, he will flex his reporting muscles, breaking a story about a flight attendant testing negative after being exposed to cruise ship passengers on their way home — an indication the virus was not as contagious as some had feared. (When the WHO eventually made the news public, The New York Times credited Inside Medicine with being first to report the story.)
The virus fascinates him. It’s rare, deadly — sickening 13 people, including three who died — and offers an opportunity to watch a super-spreader event in progress. He hopes the outbreak will help researchers better understand the dynamics of this strain of hantavirus. How did it trigger this many cases? What’s the best way to stop it?
Faust’s penchant for making medical topics accessible to the public could lend itself to future endeavors he’s considered: writing a book, for which he has several ideas; public service, in the form of a post in the federal government; and possibly establishing a lab to investigate topical public health and epidemiological questions.
Faust continues to see much of his work as journalism. Lately, though, he has described more directly how his various roles come together in his writing. The clearest example came in a June 13 post about a former MV Hondius passenger who was held against her will for 42 days in the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha. Faust had previously argued it would be safe for these passengers to return home after a period of time to finish their quarantine.
In this post, he wrote that he and another public health expert had filed written analyses on her behalf when the case came before a CDC quarantine medical reviewer. In a foot note, he added:
“As before, I acknowledge that participating in this manner has straddled the line between journalism and advocacy. I don’t attempt to hide this. Rather, I embrace it as a strength of this platform.”
On Mother’s Day, a full house packs into Brookline’s All Saints Parish for the concert by the Longwood Chorus. Clad in black, the singers perform for an enthusiastic crowd of friends, family, and neighbors.
Sitting in the empty audience area after the performance, his daughters occasionally running up to give him hugs or sit in his lap, Faust reflects on his role as conductor and the responsibility he feels to look out for the chorus members’ wellbeing.
“In science and medicine, we always think of the primary outcome. What’s the first outcome of interest?” he says. As conductor, “It’s not how I feel, it’s not how the audience feels, it’s looking at the chorus and sensing how they’re doing, taking their temperature. A few weeks ago, I felt like I’m pushing them a little too much, but today I felt really good about them.”
It’s an equilibrium Faust is constantly recalibrating for himself as well.
On any given day when he doesn’t work in the ED, it’s hard to predict where he will be. He could be appearing on television, working on a column, attending an event at his daughters’ school, chatting with a research collaborator.
“I’ve made it such that I have time to slow down and think,” he says at one of our last meetings. “I don’t know what I’m doing Monday, but I know it’ll be good.”

Unmasked: autistic women who are paving the way for a brighter future
Women with autism are known to hide, camouflage, and blend into their surroundings to help them navigate in a society that has not acknowledged their existence for years. Many women with autism, now adults, have written to bring to light the complexity, diversity, and reality of their lives.
Alex Morgan never considered that she could have autism until she took an online test for fun while sick with Covid. She was shocked to see the results.
She says, “I used to have all kinds of misconceptions regarding autism.” I thought that it was monosyllabic, boyish boys who walked around collecting data about trains and their feet.
In her book Strong Female Character, comedian Fern Brady describes how “19-year old girls” on TikTok helped her cope with the diagnosis of her adulthood.
I could find only information for the parents of children with autism. “There was a complete lack of information.
Sarah Hendrickx spent many years diagnosing autistic boys and men, but she says that “she failed miserably” to apply the diagnosis to herself.
The stories above and others show how little we knew about this condition in girls and women, even as late as the 2020s.
Mask slips
These women, despite their later diagnosis of autism, share the same desire to learn more.
Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist and expert in autism, says that the increase of late diagnoses of autism around the beginning of the decade shed light on the coping strategies women were using.
Rippon says that most of the people had tried to conceal their autism. They were hiding, desperate to socialize and fit in.
Morgan, who was diagnosed with autism three years prior, created The Autistic Woman, where she collected information and personal stories.
She says, “I realized we’re often invisible.” We hide who we are, because society has taught us to be invisible.
This month, her memoir Mothertongue was published, which revisits important life events in the light of her diagnosis.
Morgan, a journalist for a major national newspaper who was born in Edinburgh but now resides in Cockermouth in Cumbria says that she has always felt like she didn’t fit in.
She had what she thought her GP was a mental breakdown after watching The War Game, a 60s depiction of the effects of a nuke war on Britain.
“I am shaking and I cry all the time. I’m scared.” “Every sound I hear, I imagine a nuclear explosion.”
Nothing changed. She now recognises that this is autistic exhaustion.
She says, “It is when your brain becomes exhausted from trying to function in an environment that was not created for it.”
It’s tiring to suppress your reaction to this world and carry on.
Brady, a West Lothian native born in Bathgate sought help for a diagnosis five years back when she began to have meltdowns.
She says, “I had no idea what they were.”
She wrote her book, despite her fears that it would ruin her career. At the time she felt so few women spoke about “the less savoury aspects of autism”.
Her stand-up act, Autistic Bikini Queen was filmed by Netflix.
Brady: “Autism is still considered a bad word. ADHD, however, has become more common.
I find it annoying that so many people use the term neurodivergent to describe autistics.
When she wrote Strong Female Character, there was no mainstream discussion of the issue.
The thing I wanted when I was twenty years old didn’t exist.
She said she exhibited a characteristic trait of autistic women and girls, which is to do well in the workplace and then spend “weeks lying in bed unable to speak”.
She says, “I find it a bit irritating when people tell me that women are harder to diagnose because of their masking abilities.”
They don’t disguise ‘well’ due to the amount of women who end up with anxiety, depression, or eating disorders.
‘Girls don’t get autism’
Rippon is Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Neuroimaging, Aston University, Birmingham. She wrote The Lost Girls of Autism 2025, in which she investigated why women were overlooked so much.
The first studies on autism in the 1940s included a few girls. However, it was more common in males and this gender gap became “self-fulfilling”.
She explains that “the male prevalence of autism became the key definition of autism, and this affected definitely all the research in her area.”
The person who raised the concern about a girl’s behaviour was often told that girls do not get autism, or they are shy and will grow out of their problem.
Overlooking women had huge consequences.
Undiagnosed mental illness can lead to “othering and calling weird”.
Rippon: “This population has a high level of depression, suicidal thoughts, and mental illness.”
Morgan, like Brady is not new to the concept. Morgan “struggled on” in “tremendous misery and pain” following her teenage breakdown until one day, when she was in her mid-20s.
One day, I thought that I couldn’t continue to work in this high-pressure environment.
“I got up and walked away.” “I went to the house of my partner, put on my pajamas and went to sleep for six months.”
At the time, despite receiving therapy from a therapist for her autism, it was not recognized.
Morgan: “I don’t know if I would have survived without your help.”
It would have helped to know a lot earlier. In the 80s it wasn’t going to be possible.
Heal yourself by being a physician
Hendrickx began working with autistic children in the educational sector 25 years ago, and then took up a diagnosis role.
When she discovered she was autistic she already had a Masters degree in Autism and five books written on the subject.
She says, “I had a lot of children and relationships. I had a number of jobs. I did not see myself as having autism.”
“I was shocked that despite being able to diagnose other people, I had been unable to do so for myself.”
Hendrickx is from north Wales and wrote Women and Girls on The Autistic Spectrum, in which she describes the experience of women.
Perimenopause is a horrible and horrifying experience for me. “The coping mechanisms that kept me going all my life didn’t work any more.”
Diagnosis, dangers and discourse
Brady, who suffers from premenstrual disorder and is autistic herself, says that she would like medical professionals to be more informed about the impact certain conditions have on women with autism.
She says that the healthcare outcomes for people with autism are poor.
The way in which we express pain may be very different. Some people may not express pain in the same way as a neurotypical individual.
The illness can be missed and the dangers of this increase.
Rippon believes it’s important that women who believe they might be autistic are supported, and encouraged to get a diagnosis. However, the increase in women getting diagnosed on social media has led some people to think “it is a fashion accessory”.
I strongly object to this. “I think this narrative has implications and is toxic right now. It is something that should be worried about.”
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Nikita Manot
Writer, BoredPanda staff
Nikita has a knack for writing and storytelling. She combines analytical insights with creative expression to create compelling stories. She embarks at Bored Panda on a quest of exploration, fuelled by passion and curiosity, to discover diverse topics. She enjoys the simple joys of life, like gardening, making homemade food and entertaining loved ones.