Latest news with #JohnsHopkins'
Time of India
4 days ago
- Science
- Time of India
Asteroid 2024 YR4 will miss Earth but might strike the moon – what happens if it does?
An asteroid once thought to be heading for Earth is now out of sight, but not out of mind. Named 2024 YR4, this 200-foot-wide space rock could strike the moon in late 2032. And scientists are paying close attention to what that could mean for both space missions and life on Earth. From 'City Killer' to lunar threat Discovered in late 2024 by the ATLAS telescope in Chile, asteroid 2024 YR4 raised alarms. At one point, it had a 3.1% chance of hitting Earth by December 22, 2032—the highest risk ever recorded for an asteroid, according to NASA . That changed after new measurements were taken using ground-based telescopes and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). These helped track the asteroid more precisely, improving its predicted orbit by 20%. The good news: Earth is now safe. But the not-so-good news? The moon might not be. What happens if it hits? A moon impact would not threaten life on Earth directly. But the consequences could still be significant. Scientists say the strike could form a 1-kilometer-wide crater on the moon and send up to 100 million kilograms of dust and rock into space. The size of such rocks is not an issue, as the atmosphere will protect Earth from that. However, the debris could harm satellites or even astronauts on the moon. Fine lunar dust, traveling faster than a bullet, might reach Earth within days or months and trigger a bright meteor shower . Tracking, planning, and what comes next Scientists are already preparing to observe YR4 again when it comes back into view around 2028. A proposal by MIT's Julien de Wit and Johns Hopkins' Andy Rivkin to use Webb for an early look in 2026 was recently approved. 'This newly approved program will buy decision makers two extra years to prepare, though most likely to relax, as there is an 80% chance of ruling out impact,' said de Wit. Rivkin, who led the DART mission that successfully deflected a different asteroid in 2022, says YR4 presents a different kind of question. Would we ever try to deflect something headed for the moon? 'We realize that an impact to the moon could be consequential, so what would we do?' said de Wit. As more infrastructure, missions, and astronauts are expected on the moon in the coming decades, astronomers believe events like YR4 must be taken seriously. 'If this really is a thing that we only have to worry about every 5,000 years or something, then maybe that's less pressing,' Rivkin said. 'But even just asking what would we do if we did see something that was going to hit the moon is at least something that we can now start thinking about.'
Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Measles Cases Could Cost the U.S. Its Elimination Status. Here's What That Means.
The U.S. has reported more measles cases in the first half of this year than in any full year since 1992, raising concerns that the country could lose its measles elimination status and undo a 25-year public health victory amid declining vaccine rates. But exactly what does that risk mean and how close is it to really happening? For two decades, HuffPost has been fearless, unflinching, and relentless in pursuit of the truth. to keep us around for the next 20 — we can't do this without you. The World Health Organization sets the criteria for elimination status, requiring a country — or defined geographical area — to go at least 12 months without continuous domestic transmission of a virus. That means any new outbreaks during that time must come from people who contracted the virus from outside, not inside, the U.S. Under that criteria, the U.S. has until January to eliminate the nation's current outbreaks, which is a year after cases started domestically in Texas, according to epidemiology experts. If it doesn't, the U.S.'s measles elimination status could be taken away. 'It could be more impactful than a lot of Americans think about since we have had measles elimination status for so long,' Brittany Kmush, associate professor and graduate director of Syracuse University's Public Health Department, told HuffPost. 'It could affect U.S. citizens' ability to travel to specific countries if they don't want the risk of measles getting introduced to their country. It could affect other people's ability to come visit the U.S. Other countries might require proof of measles vaccination before they can reenter their home country,' she said. There could also be increased quarantine and isolation requirements, with potential economic fallout, she said. On top of this, many more people could be at risk of contracting the virus, which is considered one of the most contagious in the world. If just one person has it, up to 9 out of 10 people nearby will become infected if they are not vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's just a matter of if and when an infectious individual enters one of those communities and kind of invites an Moss, executive director of Johns Hopkins' International Vaccine Access Center 'It's not just a cold for a lot of people. It can lead to phenomena and in rare cases encephalitis and death,' said Kmush. Children younger than 5 years of age are especially vulnerable to severe illness and health complications. Fortunately, there's still time this year to fight outbreaks. Losing the elimination status is also purposely made challenging because, unless the virus is globally eradicated ― a feat only seen with smallpox ― there's always going to be cases brought into the U.S. from outside, said William Moss, executive director of Johns Hopkins' International Vaccine Access Center, who co-leads the school's measles tracking project. 'As long as there's measles virus circulating somewhere in the world, there's always going to be these importations,' he told HuffPost.'It would be very hard to maintain measles elimination status if every time someone brought it in and there was another case, you would lose it.' Whether or not outbreaks will stop before the deadline remains uncertain, however. Measles cases in the U.S. have been dropping since their peak in March, giving hope that outbreaks may be petering out. But vaccination rates remain at their lowest in years in the U.S., reducing so-called 'herd immunity' and opening the door for new outbreaks to ignite in communities that have low vaccination rates. 'It's just a matter of if and when an infectious individual enters one of those communities and kind of invites an outbreak,' said Moss, while comparing the chances to a hot ember drifting from a wildfire. 'If it lands in a wet area, you're not going to have an outbreak if there's high vaccine coverage. But if it enters an area with really low vaccine coverage, you could have another really large outbreak,' he said. With less than six months left in the year, Moss says it's still too early to start a countdown or 'really sweat about this.' He also said that even if elimination status is lost, cases are at least unlikely to return to the levels seen in the early 1990s, since vaccine levels do remain reasonably high. Kmush, however, expressed more caution on the chances of elimination being a reality. 'I am definitely alarmed,' she said, while pointing out that the U.S. nearly lost its elimination status in 2019 when there were fewer cases than those seen this year. She credited a rise in vaccine coverage and public health advocacy toward the end of that year for sparing the U.S. from losing its status. 'We were able to get them vaccinated and do the quarantine and isolation,' she said of vulnerable communities. 'Unfortunately, measles vaccination rates are even lower now than they were in 2019 and 99% of the cases that have been reported in this outbreak are either not vaccinated or have unknown vaccination status.' She and Moss both also stressed that the U.S. getting its elimination status back after losing it is also no easy feat. A country would have to show zero continuous transmission of the virus domestically for 36 months, as well as demonstrate a good virus surveillance system, which Moss said the U.S. does have. As far as what can be done now, Kmush said more people need to get vaccinated, calling it 'the greatest tool' in decreasing cases and protecting those who are unable to get vaccinated, such as babies younger than six months of age or people who are immunocompromised. 'You can do quarantine, isolation, similar to the idea with COVID, but measles is a lot more contagious than COVID,' she said. 'And so we really need everyone who is eligible to get the vaccine.' She also stressed that federal health officials need to do more to reduce vaccine hesitancy and skepticism. 'I think certain administrators and their views on vaccines have been fueling some of this vaccine hesitancy and people's reluctance to receive a vaccine that's been proven safe and effective for decades,' she said. 'The policies and some of the vaccine hesitancy and skepticism rhetoric is definitely dangerous and going to make people who are unsure about vaccines even more unsure, when they really shouldn't be.' Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has no formal medical background and has a long record of anti-vaccine advocacy and other conspiracy theories, is among those who has offered inconsistent and tepid support for the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Earlier this year, he falsely claimed that the current vaccine administered, which was first distributed in 1968, hasn't been safely tested and that its protection is short-lived. That's despite widespread use of the vaccine being credited with achieving the nation's elimination status in 2000 and saving hundreds of lives each year. Before the measles vaccine was introduced, an estimated 48,000 people were hospitalized and 400–500 people died annually in the U.S., according to the CDC. A HHS spokesperson, when recently contacted by HuffPost about the rise in cases, said that measles infection risks remain low for the overall U.S. population, 'lower than peer developed countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Italy.' 'CDC continues to recommend MMR vaccines as the best way to protect against measles,' the spokesperson added, while calling the decision to vaccinate 'a personal one.' 'People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get inoculated and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines,' they said. Related... What To Do If There's A Measles Case In Your Area Measles Cases Surge To Highest Level Since The Disease Was Eliminated In U.S. Measles Outbreak Hits Another State Amid Measles Outbreak, Texas Looks To Make Vaccine Exemptions Even Easier
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
How AI could help stop the next pandemic before it starts
Could artificial intelligence tools be used to stop the next pandemic before it starts? During the Covid pandemic, new technology developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Duke universities didn't exist. But, for the first time, researchers there say they've devised a revolutionary large language modeling tool - the type of generative AI used in ChatGP - to help predict the spread of any infectious disease, such as bird flu, monkeypox, and RSV. That could help save lives and reduce infections. 'Covid-19 elucidated the challenge of predicting disease spread due to the interplay of complex factors that were constantly changing,' Johns Hopkins' Lauren Gardner, a modeling expert who created the Covid dashboard that was relied upon by people worldwide during the pandemic, said in a statement. 'When conditions were stable the models were fine. However, when new variants emerged or policies changed, we were terrible at predicting the outcomes because we didn't have the modeling capabilities to include critical types of information,' she added. 'The new tool fills this gap.' Gardner was one of the authors of the study published Thursday in the Nature Computational Science journal. The tool, named PandemicLLM, considers recent infection spikes, new variants, and stringent protective measures. The researchers utilized data that had never been used before in pandemic prediction tools, finding that PandemicLLM could accurately predict disease patterns and hospitalization trends one to three weeks out. The data included rates of cases hospitalizations and vaccines, types of government policies, characteristics of disease variants and their prevalence, and state-level demographics. The model incorporates these elements to predict how they will come together and affect how disease behaves. They retroactively applied PandemicLLM to the Covid pandemic, looking at each state over the course of 19 months. The authors said the tool was particularly successful when the outbreak was in flux. It also outperformed existing state-of-the-art forecasting methods, including the highest performing ones on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's CovidHub. 'Traditionally we use the past to predict the future,' author Hao 'Frank' Yang, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of civil and systems engineering, said. 'But that doesn't give the model sufficient information to understand and predict what's happening. Instead, this framework uses new types of real-time information.' Going forward, they are looking at how large language models can replicate the ways individuals make decisions about their health. They hope that such a model would help officials to design safer and more effective policies. More than a million Americans have died from Covid. It's not a matter of if there will be a next pandemic, but when. Right now, the U.S. is dealing with the spread of H5N1 bird flu, RSV, HMPV, pertussis, and measles, among other health concerns. Vaccination rates for measles have plunged since the pandemic, and general vaccine hesitancy has increased. That has resulted in fears that the nation could see decades of health progress reversed. Furthermore, U.S. health officials have acted to separate from global efforts to respond to pandemics, withdrawing from the World Health Organization earlier this year. Last month, they limited access to Covid vaccines for certain groups. 'We know from Covid-19 that we need better tools so that we can inform more effective policies,' Gardner said. 'There will be another pandemic, and these types of frameworks will be crucial for supporting public health response.'
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
New Research: Childhood Vaccination Rates Drop Across 1,600 U.S. Counties
Childhood vaccination rates have markedly declined across the U.S. since the start of COVID, according to new Johns Hopkins University research showing 78% of more than 2,000 counties reported drops and the average immunization rate had fallen to 91% — further below the 95% threshold needed for herd immunity While existing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data has historically shown broadly declining measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates at the state and national levels, the county-level analysis published this week in JAMA is far more granular. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter It provides a 'better understanding of these pockets where you have more exceptionally high risk,' said senior author Lauren Gardner, the director of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering. 'Knowing where there are problem areas,' she added, 'gives policymakers and public health professionals locations to target their limited resources to try and improve vaccination coverage and therefore minimize the potential risk of measles outbreaks.' The country is currently experiencing a deadly measles outbreak that has infected over 1,000 people across 30 states and killed two unvaccinated children. Case numbers this year have already surpassed 2024's total and mark the second-highest number of confirmed cases in a year since the disease was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000. Some 96% of reported infections have involved a person who was unvaccinated or whose status was unknown and 13% have resulted in hospitalization. Related Gardner, who also led the data collection efforts behind Johns Hopkins' COVID-19 dashboard, and her team collected county-level, two-dose MMR vaccine rates for kindergarteners from each state's department of health website from 2017 to 2024, where available. Ultimately, they were able to analyze trends in 2,066 counties across 33 states and made all their data available to download. While state level average rates may decline by a few percentage points, the researchers found 130 counties where they dropped by at least 10 percentage points, and in 15 of those counties, they plummeted more than 20. Only four of the states studied — California, Connecticut, Maine and New York — reported an increase in the median county-level vaccination rate. They are currently the only four states that exclusively allow medical — and not philosophical or religious — exemptions to mandatory vaccines for school-aged children. Related Gardner said she pursued the county-level data after observing growing vaccine hesitancy and misinformation. Based on her years of work in the field, she said she was '100% expecting to see [these current outbreaks].' If vaccination rates continue to drop 'measles is likely to return to endemic levels in the US,' according to the Johns Hopkins' report — a concern other experts see as heightened by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now heading the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. A well-known vaccine skeptic, Kennedy initially downplayed the measles spread in late February and has been inconsistent in his support of the MMR vaccine. Related Under Kennedy's leadership, the Trump administration released the controversial 'Make America Healthy Again' report on May 22, which misinterpreted studies, cited ones that don't exist and is suspected of being generated in part by artificial intelligence. The report, which involved no pediatricians, questions the safety and importance of some childhood vaccines. 'Despite the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule,' the report reads, 'there has been limited scientific inquiry into the links between vaccines and chronic disease, the impacts of vaccine injury, and conflicts of interest in the development of the vaccine schedule.' Related Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, pushed back on these assertions. The issue has been well studied, and there is no evidence of links between childhood vaccines and chronic diseases — including diabetes and autism — said Offit, who is also a voting member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He referenced 24 studies across seven countries and three continents involving thousands of children that show they're at no greater risk of developing autism if they receive the MMR vaccine. Current skepticism is not isolated to the measles vaccine: The Food and Drug Administration, which falls under HHS, recently released updated guidance which no longer recommends the COVID vaccine for healthy children or pregnant women. In response, a top COVID vaccine adviser at the CDC resigned this week, according to reporting from The Washington Post. And across the country, numerous states have introduced legislation to loosen vaccine requirements for school-aged children, opening the door for more parents to opt their kids out. 'I think this is only going to get worse,' Offit said. 'I think vaccines are under attack. You have a secretary of Health and Human Services who will do everything he can during the years that he is in that position to make vaccines less available, less affordable and more feared. … So I think this is a dangerous time to be a child in the United States of America.'
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Rosetta Webster Graham, founder of the Family Bereavement Center, dies
Dr. Rosetta Webster Graham, the founder of the Family Bereavement Center in the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office, who had been a pioneering African American social worker in the Johns Hopkins' child psychiatry division, died Feb. 12 at Dulaney Valley Assisted Living. She was 101 and had resided on Kingsway Road. Her niece, Lolita D. Tyler, said she died of old age. Born in Baltimore and raised in Canton, she was the daughter of Freddie Graham, who owned a series of businesses, and his wife, Rose Webster Graham, who died when her daughter was five years old. She was a Frederick Douglass High School graduate and earned a bachelor's degree and doctorate at Morgan State University and a master's degree at Howard University. She began her career in 1946 when she took a summer internship at Rockland State Hospital in a pilot program that accepted both Black and white social worker students. She also joined the Homewood Friends Meeting in Baltimore, where she remained a congregant. After graduating from Morgan, she worked at a school for delinquent Black girls in Glen Burnie and later got a post as a social worker at the Johns Hopkins University. 'At Hopkins, I taught medical students, social work students and psychiatric residents. I was the first Black appointed to the Board of Pediatric Psychiatry,' she wrote in an autobiographical sketch. She then founded the Family Bereavement Center sponsored by the Baltimore City State's Attorney's office. The center provided counseling and support for family members of victims of homicide. The program was featured on 'Street Stories' with TV host Ed Bradley. 'If people can sit down and talk to you about their problems and trust you, then they have given you something,' she said in a 1991 Baltimore Sun article that explored her work with survivors of murder victims at the bereavement center and that described her as 'soft spoken.' 'I didn't think it would be very depressing,' Dr. Graham said in the article. 'I have always been sensitive to working with other people's grief. I had worked with dying children, I had worked with the parents of dying children, I had worked with a disturbed population.' She observed: 'Relief from grief doesn't happen in a smooth consistent fashion. It goes back and forth.' 'With murder victims' survivors, usually much of the grief comes from not having had a chance to say goodbye; there's no closure,' she said. 'Also, someone has violated you, someone has taken from you what was yours.' In the article, she revealed how her childhood provided lessons that served her in later life. 'What I do goes back to growing up in a community where there was so much concern shown for others,' she said of her years in Southeast Baltimore. 'Everyone who knew Rosetta would agree that she was truly an encourager. One of her students recalled she presented 'a word of the day,' that represented strength, steadfastness, or inspiration,' said her niece, Lolita. 'Most of all, she was a strong voice for the defenseless and vulnerable. She greeted you with a witty sense of humor, a thought-provoking observation, and her enchanting smile. ' A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. March 15 at the Homewood Friends Meeting, 3111 N. Charles St. Survivors include numerous nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews. Have a news tip? Contact Jacques Kelly at and 410-332-6570.
