_________________ Glen COVe ________________
CoMMUNITY UPDATE Infections as of May 24
4,095
Infections as of May 18 4,090
$1.00
HERALD
Playground opens at Garvies Point
Rising Tide supports charity
Finley honor society inductees
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Vol. 30 No. 22
MAY 27 - JUNE 2, 2021
GCHS junior continues to fight cancer BY JIll NossA jnossa@liherald.com
Jill Nossa/Herald
RYAN AGUIlAR, sECoND from right, with, from left, his grandparents Barbara and Horace Brown; his parents, Deirdre and Raul Aguilar; his brother, Jaden, and Spider-Man, who made a special visit last Saturday.
For the past six months, the Aguilar family of Glen Cove has been dealing with a harrowing challenge: pediatric cancer. Ryan Aguilar, 17, a junior at Glen Cove High School, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer, last November. To show support and raise his spirits, relatives, friends and neighbors organized a car parade past the Aguilar home on Doxey Drive last Saturday morning. “I was surprised,” Ryan
said, sitting on his front lawn after watching the procession. “I didn’t think this would happen. It was nice to see everyone.” His grandparents Barbara and Horace Brown drove in from Brooklyn, but, like Ryan, were not told about what would be happening. “It’s overwhelming,” Horace Brown said of the parade. “We didn’t expect it, and it’s nice to see the support of the neighborhood and the community.” According to Ryan’s mother, Deirdre Brown Aguilar, the family began taking regular Continued on page 2
There’s a new name for a well-known itch — ‘maskne’ By lAURA lANE llane@liherald.com
Nancy Widman said that when she first noticed the rash on her neck, she didn’t think anything of it. But it got worse, spreading down her throat onto her chest. Widman’s doctor attributed her condition to the cloth masks she had been wearing to avoid getting Covid-19. She recommended that she switch to paper masks, and gave her a prescription for medication. “She told me it was definitely from moisture from my mask, and gave me cortisone cream and prednisone,” said Widman, who lives in Salisbury.
Dr. Paul Mustacchia, an internist and the chair of the Department of Medicine at Nassau University Medical Center, said he was familiar with mask-related acne, which was renamed “maskne” during the pandemic. “When I first heard the new name, I did a double-take,” he said. “The name has no scientific relevance.” Maskne occurs when people wear tight-fitting masks for long periods of time. A mask creates a moist environment from breathing, talking or sweating, which can block pores, leading to acne or other skin conditions, including allergic contact dermatitis, rosacea, seborrheic der-
matitis and folliculitis (see box, Page 17). But maskne is not new. Athletes who wear helmets or protective face and body gear have traditionally been susceptible to it. Dr. Raman Madan, director of cosmetic dermatology and an assistant clinical professor at Northwell Health, attributes the increase he saw in maskne cases last May and June among nonathletes to pandemic mask wearing. In the early days of the health crisis, he said, people were reusing masks because they weren’t widely available. “In the beginning, people didn’t know why they were get-
ting [maskne], but some put two and two together,” Madan said. “I continue to see a steady flow of patients with it, but more than half are health care workers, because they wear N95 masks and a cloth mask over it, which creates more moisture.” Health care workers have been double masking, Mustacchia explained, to preserve their
N-95 masks. “The N-95 mask gives us a tight fit, creating a seal so organisms don’t get in or out,” he said. “That seal decreases the likelihood of contacting the virus but creates more moisture and heat.” NUMC has treated close to 2,000 acute Covid-19 cases, Mustacchia said, making mask-wearContinued on page 17