The announcement came less than three months after the hospital system told families it plans to shutter its PANS/PANDAS program offered through Mass General Brigham for Children in January. At the time, the hospital suggested patients could continue treatment through MGB even after the closure.
Parents and advocates say Williams is one of two MGB doctors who primarily treat PANS/PANDAS patients.
In a statement to The Globe, MGB said the message about Williams was sent to patients in error and “did not accurately reflect Mass General Brigham for Children’s plans for continuity of care.” But MGB confirmed that Williams would leave at the end of the year.
“We recognize that the recent communication may have created confusion for patients and families, and we regret that,” the hospital said. MGB added that it is working to provide more information directly to families to help them understand what care options are available to them.
Williams did not respond to an interview request.
Jennifer Vitelli, executive director of the Look. Foundation, a Massachusetts-based PANS/PANDAS advocacy group, called Tuesday’s message “incredibly confusing.”
“We are 65 days from closure, and PANS/PANDAS patients and their families are still in limbo,” Vitelli said. “A list of providers they may not be able to access or afford is not continuity of care. They need specific physician names, referrals, appointments, and a clear plan now.”
MGB’s PANS/PANDAS program is one of the few of its kind nationwide that aims to address the condition’s medical and psychiatric concerns, and the decision to close it sparked widespread anger and fear among parents. Many said they didn’t understand why the program was ending.
The news of Williams leaving the hospital raised additional concerns about whether patients can still receive treatment at MGB.
The notice that went out Tuesday included five options for alternative care. One was a link to a neuroimmune psychiatric disorders clinic at Dartmouth Health Children’s in Lebanon, N.H. It also listed Dr. Yujuan (Julia) Zhang, a well-regarded pediatric rheumatologist at Tufts Medical Center, who previously told The Globe that she has seen more than 580 PANS/PANDAS patients in the last two years and has a months-long waiting list for new patients. Some parents said the options provided by MGB would likely require families to travel long distances or pay out of pocket for treatment.
“This is a joke list,” said Kim Panton, a PANS/PANDAS advocate and Duxbury resident whose two adult sons were diagnosed with the condition as children and received care at MGB.
Finding care has long been challenging for families.
Treatment consists of first dealing with the trigger, if it’s still present. Patients might receive antibiotics or anti-inflammatory treatments, such as ibuprofen. People with more severe cases may require infusions of healthy antibodies, a treatment known as intravenous immunoglobulin, or IVIG. While patients are being treated for the inflammatory problem, doctors might also simultaneously treat behavioral symptoms, with cognitive behavioral therapy or other kinds of therapy and medication, including antidepressants.
Jessica Purcell, a mother of two children with PANDAS receiving care at MGB, said Williams was instrumental in getting her kids access to antibiotics and anti-inflammatories.
“Without him, we wouldn’t be on the right track,” said Purcell, who lives in Hanson. “I have no idea what we’re going to do.”
Parents and PANS/PANDAS providers say many health care professionals are either not familiar with or, in some cases, skeptical of the diagnosis and treatment. Sick children, for instance, are often initially referred to psychiatric services.
The American Academy of Pediatrics called PANS “likely a valid diagnosis” in a recent clinical report, but said more research on the condition is needed and raised concerns about widely used treatments. The AAP considers PANDAS a subset of PANS.
In Massachusetts, the law requires insurance to cover care for PANS and PANDAS, including the treatments the AAP cautioned about.
MGB said it has other providers with expertise in the psychiatric treatment of PANS/PANDAS. Existing patients will continue to have access to that care as well as “other multidisciplinary clinicians as clinically appropriate,” the hospital said.
In response to previous questions from the Globe about the treatment program’s closure, MGB said at the time it would continue to provide care through the hospital’s child and adolescent psychiatry department, pediatric infectious disease specialists, and primary care providers.
“We recognize that children diagnosed with PANS/PANDAS can experience severe and disabling symptoms, with a profound impact on them and their families,” MGB said. The decision to close the program “does not mean that we are dismissing these children’s symptoms or their need for care.”
But many parents say they are still concerned whether their children will be able to have access to antibiotics and other immunotherapies, such as IVIG, if they stay at MGB.
“This is a medical issue,” said Panton, whose son recently experienced a return of symptoms and needed IVIG treatment. “The psychiatric part is critical. It’s really important to help manage the psych symptoms until they can get the medical part of this under control. You’re looking at a two-prong approach to dealing with PANDAS kids.”

Some dogs love doggy daycare so much they don’t want to leave, and Jax, the Golden Retriever, is one of them. So when his mom, Meg, comes to pick him up, he makes it very clear in the cutest way possible that he’s not ready to go, and has us all in stitches.
Watch as Meg pulls on the leash and calmly asks him to get in the car. When he doesn’t, she takes matters into her own hands… literally. She has to drag him to the car, then give him a boost to get in. We’re not sure what goes on at daycare, but it must be a lot more fun than what happens at home!
Meg admits in the caption, “I get embarrassed that they watch me do this from their window every time…” Sorry, Meg! The neighbors are probably watching too because it’s so funny to watch such a stubborn dog!
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Viewers Understand Why He Never Wants the Fun To End
Viewers got a kick out of watching Jax refuse to help Meg get him into the car. @Haleyrae61 shared a screenshot of Jax’s face as Meg pulled on his leash and said what he was probably thinking: “You can’t make me, b*tch!”
@kandihndrx made a good point: “At least you know they are not abusing him at daycare, lol!” Another commenter added, “At this point, he thinks you’re the daycare, lol!”
Commenter @Lisa got nearly 40k likes for saying, “I need a video of how he goes into daycare!” So do we; we hope she’ll post one soon because we have a feeling it’s a much different scene!
Related: Grandpa Picks up the Wrong Dog From Daycare, and the Internet Is Losing It

A pair of sick raccoons found this month in a Los Angeles suburb set off alarm bells from California to Georgia, where officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took notice. The animals, found three weeks apart in Westlake Village, are the first raccoons in the county to test positive for rabies since 1973.
Rabies is a deadly virus that attacks the nervous system and spreads via the saliva of an infected animal, usually through a bite. Across different U.S. regions, distinct variants of rabies are more common depending on what animal is most likely to harbor the virus. In California, bats and skunks are most likely to have the disease, so bat and skunk rabies variants are the most common. Other mammals, like a coyote, dog or cat, can still get sick by the bat or skunk rabies variant. But what worries public health experts is the possible arrival of an unexpected rabies variant that could spread widely among a new animal population.
Dr. Ryan Wallace, a veterinary epidemiologist at the CDC, told SFGATE if the raccoons tested positive for a raccoon variant of rabies, that could trigger a multimillion-dollar federal and state response to combat that newly arrived strain of disease and decrease the risk of human cases.
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“Raccoons don’t have too much of a fear of humans, or at least living in human habitats,” he said. “When you have a rabies virus shift into a new species, especially one that has such close ecological relationship with humans, you can see drastic increases in human exposures.”
Sick raccoons wandering around a SoCal backyard are just the latest indicator that the rabies virus may be on the rise, not just in California but nationally. In September, the CDC reported a 76% jump in people getting post-exposure treatment for the virus. And in California, state officials reported the number of rabid animals found has broken a 28-year record.
However, delays in national data analysis mean state and federal experts remain unsure whether this deadly disease is actually on the rise, or where.
‘Very scary’
Among viruses, rabies is unusual in its ability to infect and kill any species of mammal.
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Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UC San Francisco, called the virus, which attacks the nervous system, “very, very scary.”
“It basically goes straight into the brain,” she said. An initial headache then leads to horrifying symptoms including seizures, paralysis and “rapid neurologic changes, behavioral changes, hallucinations, delirium,” Gandhi said.
The disease is virtually 100% fatal in people, and animals, if they develop symptoms. But people exposed to rabies can be given a vaccine or immunoglobulin shots after exposure that prevents the virus from replicating, saving their life.
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In the U.S., 100,000 animals are tested annually by public health laboratories, and about 4,000 rabid animals are found. On average, fewer than 10 people die of the disease every year. The last death reported in California was in 2024 when an art teacher in Merced County became infected after she found a bat in her classroom and took it outside.
California breaks a decades-old record
While there hasn’t been a confirmed human case in the state in years, California’s wild animals haven’t been so lucky. At least 368 rabid animals have been found in the state so far this year, the highest since 1998. The majority of the rabid animals were found in Southern California and nearly all were bats or skunks.
Beth Deines, a spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health, said despite the increase in wildlife rabies detection, the risk to the public remains low.
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“The specific reason for the increase is not yet known, but rabies detections in wildlife can vary from year to year and by season,” Deines said in an emailed statement. “There is currently no evidence that rabies has expanded beyond the bat and skunk populations in which the disease is routinely detected in California.”
Shannon Bennett, chief science officer at the California Academy of Sciences, said it’s not clear whether more animals are actually getting sick or more people are bringing sick animals to be tested.
“It’s all passive [testing] by public,” Bennett told SFGATE. “I think what no one’s doing is asking what is the true prevalence of rabies in bats by going out and sampling wild populations.”
Bennett said other factors that could explain the increase is the spread of urban areas in wildlife spaces and potentially even climate change, with warmer temperatures helping viruses replicate faster.
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“There’s no question that a warming climate makes viruses and other microbes really happy,” she said.
Wallace confirmed in an emailed statement the two rabid raccoons discovered in SoCal tested positive for the bat variant of the virus, which is a good indication that a new raccoon-specific strain hasn’t arisen in the area. But Wallace noted that two sick animals warrant “close monitoring” since “repeated introductions increases the risk that raccoons could become a new reservoir host in the LA area.”
A national mystery
The large number of California detections comes amid signs that the virus may be on the rise in other areas of the U.S.
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In September, the CDC released an alert for a dramatic spike in the number of people getting post-exposure treatment for rabies. It found there was a 76% increase in the number of people receiving rabies immunoglobulin shots, given after possible exposure to prevent the virus from replicating. It also found a 33% increase in people being given rabies vaccines compared with the year prior.
Wallace said CDC researchers saw numbers increase dramatically in May and June and said rabies vaccine sales remained elevated through at least early October.
“We can’t tell from that data source if it’s generalized across the United States, localized to a region, and we can’t tell what species is driving it,” he said.
Wallace said researchers turned to a large language artificial intelligence model to scrape media reports of rabid animal detections in the U.S., which showed a “generalized increase” of rabies exposures in California, Indiana, Ohio and Maine.
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“The only signal we are getting from a species point of view is a modest increase in bats,” he said.
Wallace said people concerned about rabies exposure should never handle dead wildlife and always keep pets up to date on their rabies vaccines. Anyone who comes into contact with bats should consult a physician because a bat’s teeth are very small and people may not notice they were bitten.
Flying blind
In recent years, the CDC has developed sophisticated models that can analyze data from county and state public health reports and look for unusual activity. Wallace said these tools identified a rabies outbreak in Texas in 2023.
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But since the start of the Trump administration, the CDC has dealt with major cuts and lost about 30% of its staff. Wallace declined to speak directly about funding but said that the 130 labs that test 100,000 animals require “sustained maintenance, and it also requires sustained effort.”
“When the data is flowing appropriately, we do have really cool tools,” he said. But he acknowledged those tools and systems “are not up to date right now.”
The last rabies surveillance report released by the CDC was for 2024, with no current timeline for the release of the 2025 report.
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“We’re a little over a year behind on that flow of data moving up and us being able to answer confidently a question like, ‘What is the national trend in rabies?’” Wallace said.
It doesn’t mean the U.S. is totally blind to rabies trends, as “state and local health departments are experts at conducting surveillance in their jurisdictions,” he said. But Wallace acknowledged “broader regional and national epidemiological trends are more challenging for timely identification.”
Dr. Matt Willis, an infectious disease expert and former public health officer for Marin County, said California’s robust public health system means the state is unlikely to miss major rabies trends locally, but said a hampered CDC could mean missing larger viral trends.
States “count things in different ways, and it becomes really hard to see actually what’s happening because you end up with sort of an apples-and-oranges comparison state to state,” Willis said.
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Even if the CDC eventually gets to the backlog of data and analysis, Willis said the delay is concerning.
“If they are that far behind, it is possible that there’s a much bigger problem that we’re just not seeing,” he said.

You may know the spiral well: It starts off as a single worry, such as how tonight’s date will go, whether you made a mistake at work or what an abnormal medical test result means. Then it takes on a life of its own. What if they don’t like me? and What if this result means something serious? become What if I never find someone? and What if I’m dying? Potential outcomes spin off into terrible futures, and next thing you know, you’re fielding some flavor of What if everything turns out terribly and nothing is ever okay?!

An elementary school in Camp Springs, Maryland, will be closed for the rest of the week to curb the spread of multiple illnesses among its student body and staff.
Prince George’s County Public Schools and the county’s health department have decided to close Princeton Elementary School after 48 students and 16 staff members reported to have “influenza-like and gastroenteritis-like symptoms,” Associate Superintendent Denise Douglas said. Officials did not say what the specific illness is.
Additional details on the school’s reopening and instructional plans will be sent directly to families.
“The temporary closure allows for the necessary infectious period to pass and enables facility crews to conduct a comprehensive deep cleaning and sanitization of the school building,” Douglas said.
Parents and guardians are reminded to keep their children home if they show signs of illness and to practice preventive measures, including handwashing and covering coughs and sneezes.
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Metropolitan Hospitality Group is making its debut in Maryland, with Open Road and a cafe and wine bar concept coming to Chevy Chase. Two new restaurants, Open Road, an American restaurant and gathering place, and Cove, an all-day cafe and wine bar, are coming to The Collection in Friendship Heights. “We have been thoughtful about where and how MHG would make its first move into Maryland, and Friendship Heights immediately stood out,” Metropolitan Hospitality Group President Matthew Carlin said in a news release. “It is an established community with a strong sense of place, excellent connectivity and residents who value quality dining and genuine hospitality.” Open Road Chevy Chase will be located at 5471 Wisconsin Ave. alongside Cove. Open Road also has several locations around Northern Virginia.