Larry Luxner

2 days ago | jta.org | Larry Luxner

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Jamie Mafdali of South Florida was hit with a cancer double-whammy three years ago. Shortly after her mother began treatment for breast cancer and learned it had metastasized, Mafdali herself was diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma in her left breast. Given her family history, Mafdali, now 45, decided to get a bilateral mastectomy.

6 days ago | rarediseaseadvisor.com | Larry Luxner

LOWELL, Massachusetts—Jimmy Pollard doesn’t have Huntington disease (HD), and neither does anyone in his family. Nor is this unassuming man a doctor or scientist on the verge of some big discovery. Yet Pollard, 73, is among the nation’s most prominent activists fighting for those with HD—a passion that began in 1986, when he was the program director at a Massachusetts nursing home. “One day, we got our first referral of a young woman living with Huntington’s disease.

1 week ago | washingtonjewishweek.com | Larry Luxner

Maddison Spiegel of Westchester County, New York, had tried for years to go on a Birthright trip to Israel but somehow it never happened. The first time she was supposed to go the COVID-19 pandemic got in the way, freezing all trips. The next time Spiegel applied she learned belatedly she had missed a deadline. Then came the war sparked by Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Finally—this past December—Spiegel unexpectedly was offered a spot on Birthright.

1 week ago | washdiplomat.com | Larry Luxner |Eastern Europe |Puerto Rico

Hanène Tajouri Bessassi, Tunisia’s ambassador in Washington for the last three and a half years, is leaving at the end of July. She arrived in October 2021, just as the pandemic was winding down, and witnessed not only Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but also catastrophic flooding in Libya, a horrific civil war in Sudan, an explosion of violence between Israel and Hamas—and, of course, Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

1 week ago | rarediseaseadvisor.com | Larry Luxner

It’s no picnic living with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Jimmy Castillowants the world to know. Speaking at a recent online event organized by the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD), Castillo said he’s suffered from this extremely rare, potentially life-threatening skin condition for the last 6 years. “It’s been a journey,” he said. “You have no idea how it feels to be stared at. People look at you and think it’s a contagious disease.