Prime Minister Andy Burnham has been challenged to a "rock battle" by a health campaigner. Ashleigh Harley was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) in 2020, which causes her joints to dislocate without warning. The 27-year-old believes she has lived with the condition since she was 12 and said her health became so bad that she needed life support after becoming unable to eat, walk or speak.
In a bid to raise awareness of EDS, she plans to duet with 1960s singer Brian Hyland outside Downing Street, performing his hit Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini. Harley has already released her own version of the song to raise funds for her charity, Save Our Lives, but the unlikely musical double act will perform together on Saturday. "Will [Burnham] be there?
We've asked him and challenged him to a rock battle, but we've not heard anything back," she said. "Apparently he was a rocker back in the day. "I'm doing the first solo, and Andy Burnham, you're very welcome to do the second solo." Hyland, 82, promised a "joyful performance".
When it comes on the radio, people start smiling - it's just one of those songs," he said. Harley's story had touched him "immensely", he said, describing it as a "tragic situation" in which children have "their childhood taken away". EDS are a group of rare inherited conditions that affect the tissue conecting parts of the body, such as in tendons and ligaments, the NHS says., external Harley, from Luston, Herefordshire, said she first began suffering from the effects of her condition at the age of 12, when she experienced her first seizure.
"I got seizures every day, which made school completely impossible because I was collapsing every day," she remembered. I was getting paralysis quite badly, so I couldn't use my hands. I couldn't write down stuff.
"That was the first episode. That was when we realised something was wrong. "We went down every single different route, and the doctors couldn't figure out what it was.
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