Latest news with #Ratner
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
East River path in Manhattan faces detour
MANHATTAN, N.Y. (PIX11) — Visitors and neighbors want to know what's happening to a well-known pathway in Manhattan along the East River. A detour redirects pedestrians and cyclists when they arrive at an area between East 71st and 78th streets. People have to travel seven blocks on York Avenue. It has been in place for about four years. More Local News Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) is building a new tower over the FDR Drive at the point of closure. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation also has to repair sinkholes in the area. Friends of the East River Esplanade have been advocating for two decades to bring attention and improvements to the entire stretch. Jennifer Ratner founded the group, and she wants more from the hospital and city. 'It makes me really angry when I see this. Waterfront parks are contiguous like the West Side and Brooklyn. This has cut it off for four springs and summers. I've asked them many times to do something at the entrance. At night, it's scary,' Ratner said. The parks department is creating new signs to navigate the detour. 'We remain committed to growing greenways: through our Vital Parks for All plan, there is an investment of more than $1 billion by Parks and City agency partners to meet the growing demand for biking and walking connections that link parks to one another and to business districts, improving livability, health, and the environment in disadvantaged communities across the five boroughs,' wrote the spokesperson in an email to PIX11 News. HSS expects to finish construction this fall and open the new facility for patients in the first half of 2026. 'In conjunction with the construction of the Kellen Tower, HSS is planning a beautification project of the East River Esplanade from 72nd to 78th streets, including new pavers, landscaping, and an area for exercise equipment,' wrote Melissa Kiefer, HSS vice president for Project Development, Planning, Design, and Construction. HSS work on the esplanade is scheduled to begin this summer and to be completed in spring of 2026, 'pending the progress of the Parks project that has overlapping areas of improvement work,' Kiefer added. Ratner wants to see improvements this year. 'HSS used the esplanade for free, and it needs to do the work. Parks has said it would do infrastructure work for years, but hasn't. Signage is not enough,' Ratner said. The elevated path runs in sections from Lower Manhattan to Harlem. In 2023, a major new area of parkland opened in Midtown. Parts of the uptown section have been closed for repairs. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Immune amnesia: Why even mild measles infections can lead to serious disease later
Dr. Adam Ratner has heard a lot of myths and misunderstandings about measles in his decades as a New York City pediatric infectious disease specialist. A troubling untruth he's seen circulating on social media during the current outbreak is that being infected with the virus instead of getting vaccinated confers benefits on the immune system — a strength-training program of sorts for the cells. The truth, Ratner said, 'is exactly the opposite.' Measles is a highly contagious virus that presents as a rash and cold-like symptoms for many patients, and can lead to serious or fatal complications for others. An outbreak that began in west Texas in January has since infected nearly 500 people across 19 states, including eight people in California. An insidious but lesser-known consequence of even a mild measles infection is that it kills the very cells that remember which pathogens the patient has previously fought and how those battles were won. As a result, recurring bugs that might have caused only minor symptoms make patients as sick as if they'd never encountered them before. Measles destroys lymphocytes that defend against other bugs to make way for ones that defend against measles, an immunity won at the cost of other protections. This 'immune amnesia,' physicians say, leaves patients vulnerable to reccurrences of diseases their immune cells were previously able to resist. If a child gets sick with measles, "for the next two or three years, you kind of have to be looking over your kid's shoulder, wondering if some otherwise routine virus or bacteria that they should be very well protected against is potentially going to land them in the hospital,' said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist who was previously an assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard Medical School. 'Even if your measles virus infection seemed mild and you kind of blew through it, it doesn't mean that it was mild on your immune system," Mina added. Read more: A leading pediatrician was already worried about the future of vaccines. Then RFK Jr. came along Take rotavirus, Ratner said, which causes severe diarrhea that can be life-threatening for children if untreated. A child who has rotavirus once will have antibodies that offer protection against future infections. But a measles infection, said Ratner, author of the recent book "Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health,' "could wipe out that immunity and they could be just as vulnerable to rotavirus as if they had never seen it before.' Immune amnesia results from the measles virus' plan of attack. Viral particles travel via airborne droplets of saliva, mucus and cells that make their way into a new body when their unsuspecting host breathes them in. From there, they sneak past the protective barrier lining the respiratory system and head to the lymph nodes in search of cells that express a particular protein called signaling lymphocytic activation molecule, or SLAM. The virus then rides around the bloodstream on these hijacked SLAM-expressing cells, further infecting and destroying other SLAM expressers it meets on the way. Among the SLAM-expressing cells that measles wrecks are memory B and T cells, two crucial players in a functioning immune system. Memory B cells manufacture the right antibodies quickly when a familiar microbe appears. Memory T cells recognize and kill viruses that your cells have encountered in the past. A measles infection feeds on these memory cells. Vaccines, in contrast, stimulate the production of memory B and T cells without consuming others in the process. This was not yet understood in the decades before the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine's approval in 1963, when measles was a common childhood disease that killed some 400 children in the U.S. each year. 'For 100 years or more, we've known that measles does cause an acute susceptibility to other infections,' Mina said. A measles infection temporarily suppresses the immune system, Mina said, and it was long assumed that opportunistic infections around the time of the illness were the result of that short-term suppression. In 2015, Mina and colleagues published a paper that looked at mortality data in the U.S., the United Kingdom and Denmark before and after measles vaccines were introduced. They found that whenever there were measles outbreaks, childhood deaths from all other infectious diseases remained significantly higher for two to three years in outbreak locations, an increase that accounted for up to half of all childhood deaths from infectious disease. Once those countries rolled out the MMR vaccine, measles cases fell, as expected. But so did childhood deaths from other infectious diseases, by about half. Three years later, Mina and his collaborators took blood samples from 77 unvaccinated children in a community in the Netherlands before and then two to six months after the children contracted measles. They found that the virus wiped out 11% to 73% of the children's preexisting antibodies to a host of pathogens. Just as children in preschool fall ill constantly with common diseases they're encountering for the first time, unvaccinated children who contract measles are at higher risk in the ensuing years for common early childhood sicknesses such as respiratory infections, earaches and viruses that cause diarrhea, said Shelly Bolotin, a scientist at Public Health Ontario in Canada and director of the Center for Vaccine Preventable Diseases at the University of Toronto. 'In order to correct that depletion [of B and T cells], you need to be reexposed to everything you were immune to before, and this can take years,' she said. As of late March, 97% of the people sickened in the current outbreak were unvaccinated or didn't disclose their vaccine status. The measles virus is attenuated in the MMR vaccine, meaning that it has been altered to produce the appropriate immune response without triggering the disease itself. In the case of measles, that means no mass destruction of the cells that hold the immune system's memory. 'It doesn't have this very, very damaging effect, which is why we recommend vaccination, because we get all of the immunity with none of the adverse consequences,' Bolotin said. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
03-04-2025
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
Immune amnesia: Why even mild measles infections can lead to serious disease later
Dr. Adam Ratner has heard a lot of myths and misunderstandings about measles in his decades as a New York City pediatric infectious disease specialist. A troubling untruth he's seen circulating on social media during the current outbreak is that being infected with the virus instead of getting vaccinated confers benefits on the immune system — a strength-training program of sorts for the cells. The truth, Ratner said, 'is exactly the opposite.' Measles is a highly contagious virus that presents as a rash and cold-like symptoms for many patients, and can lead to serious or fatal complications for others. An outbreak that began in west Texas in January has since infected nearly 500 people across 19 states, including eight people in California. An insidious but lesser-known consequence of even a mild measles infection is that it kills the very cells that remember which pathogens the patient has previously fought and how those battles were won. As a result, recurring bugs that might have caused only minor symptoms make patients as sick as if they'd never encountered them before. Measles destroys lymphocytes that defend against other bugs to make way for ones that defend against measles, an immunity won at the cost of other protections. This 'immune amnesia,' physicians say, leaves patients vulnerable to reccurrences of diseases their immune cells were previously able to resist. If a child gets sick with measles, 'for the next two or three years, you kind of have to be looking over your kid's shoulder, wondering if some otherwise routine virus or bacteria that they should be very well protected against is potentially going to land them in the hospital,' said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist who was previously an assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard Medical School. 'Even if your measles virus infection seemed mild and you kind of blew through it, it doesn't mean that it was mild on your immune system,' Mina added. Take rotavirus, Ratner said, which causes severe diarrhea that can be life-threatening for children if untreated. A child who has rotavirus once will have antibodies that offer protection against future infections. But a measles infection, said Ratner, author of the recent book 'Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health,' 'could wipe out that immunity and they could be just as vulnerable to rotavirus as if they had never seen it before.' Immune amnesia results from the measles virus' plan of attack. Viral particles travel via airborne droplets of saliva, mucus and cells that make their way into a new body when their unsuspecting host breathes them in. From there, they sneak past the protective barrier lining the respiratory system and head to the lymph nodes in search of cells that express a particular protein called signaling lymphocytic activation molecule, or SLAM. The virus then rides around the bloodstream on these hijacked SLAM-expressing cells, further infecting and destroying other SLAM expressers it meets on the way. Among the SLAM-expressing cells that measles wrecks are memory B and T cells, two crucial players in a functioning immune system. Memory B cells manufacture the right antibodies quickly when a familiar microbe appears. Memory T cells recognize and kill viruses that your cells have encountered in the past. A measles infection feeds on these memory cells. Vaccines, in contrast, stimulate the production of memory B and T cells without consuming others in the process. This was not yet understood in the decades before the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine's approval in 1963, when measles was a common childhood disease that killed some 400 children in the U.S. each year. 'For 100 years or more, we've known that measles does cause an acute susceptibility to other infections,' Mina said. A measles infection temporarily suppresses the immune system, Mina said, and it was long assumed that opportunistic infections around the time of the illness were the result of that short-term suppression. In 2015, Mina and colleagues published a paper that looked at mortality data in the U.S., the United Kingdom and Denmark before and after measles vaccines were introduced. They found that whenever there were measles outbreaks, childhood deaths from all other infectious diseases remained significantly higher for two to three years in outbreak locations, an increase that accounted for up to half of all childhood deaths from infectious disease. Once those countries rolled out the MMR vaccine, measles cases fell, as expected. But so did childhood deaths from other infectious diseases, by about half. Three years later, Mina and his collaborators took blood samples from 77 unvaccinated children in a community in the Netherlands before and then two to six months after the children contracted measles. They found that the virus wiped out 11% to 73% of the children's preexisting antibodies to a host of pathogens. Just as children in preschool fall ill constantly with common diseases they're encountering for the first time, unvaccinated children who contract measles are at higher risk in the ensuing years for common early childhood sicknesses such as respiratory infections, earaches and viruses that cause diarrhea, said Shelly Bolotin, a scientist at Public Health Ontario in Canada and director of the Center for Vaccine Preventable Diseases at the University of Toronto. 'In order to correct that depletion [of B and T cells], you need to be reexposed to everything you were immune to before, and this can take years,' she said. As of late March, 97% of the people sickened in the current outbreak were unvaccinated or didn't disclose their vaccine status. The measles virus is attenuated in the MMR vaccine, meaning that it has been altered to produce the appropriate immune response without triggering the disease itself. In the case of measles, that means no mass destruction of the cells that hold the immune system's memory. 'It doesn't have this very, very damaging effect, which is why we recommend vaccination, because we get all of the immunity with none of the adverse consequences,' Bolotin said.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Pediatrician Responds to Parents Who Called Measles 'Not That Bad' — After Their Unvaccinated Child Died (Exclusive)
The parents of an unvaccinated 6-year-old who died during the Texas measles outbreak called the highly contagious virus that infected all five of their children "not that bad" In a controversial interview conducted by an anti-vaccine group, the parents said they "absolutely" would not get the shots — which pediatrician and infectious disease specialist Dr. Adam Ratner tells PEOPLE are the best way to prevent the infection Dr. Ratner also responded to claims about how alternative remedies can help — and how the parents' statements that measles is good for the immune system are medically incorrect The Texas parents of a child who died of measles in February have given their first, and only, filmed interview — a highly controversial one in which they refer to the disease that took their child's life as 'not that bad.' In the March 17 interview with the anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense (which was founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) the parents, sometimes speaking Low German through a translator, defended their decision to not vaccinate their children against measles. Instead, they explained that their six-year-old's death showed "it was her time," and "she was too good for this earth." The family also said they would "absolutely not take the MMR vaccine" — which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella — and shared that their four other children recovered quickly, crediting alternative solutions. The child's death is the first U.S. fatality from the highly contagious illness in a decade, the Associated Press reports. According to the parents' interview, the child developed a fatal case of pneumonia, a common complication from the airborne virus. To learn more about the controversial statements raised in the interview, PEOPLE spoke to pediatrician and infectious disease specialist Dr. Adam Ratner, author of Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health. The parents said their other four children who had the measles 'got over it pretty quickly,' adding, 'the measles wasn't that bad.' Why do some people get sick from measles — and some die? 'In a lot of cases ,we don't know why one particular child will get sicker than another. There's not usually a good way of predicting that, and that's one of the reasons why it's so important for everyone to get vaccinated, because if you protect everybody, then you don't have to worry about that,' Dr. Ratner explained. While 'the vast majority' of kids are sick for about a week, he says, 'some kids, including this six-year-old who died, can develop pneumonia or other adverse events, and they can end up needing to be hospitalized and can be sick for much longer — or, as she did, can go on to die.' The parents said they would "absolutely not" get the MMR vaccine, and her father shared that measles 'are good for the body,' and can help protect people from getting cancer. 'None of that is true,' Dr. Ratner tells PEOPLE. 'Measles are not good for people in any way. They put children in grave danger as they did for that family's daughter. They put children at risk of other infections for a couple of years after measles. And there is no evidence that measles has any effect on risk for cancer or risk for anything else later on.' As he explained, 'We now know that there are also some later onset issues that can come up with measles. There's a degenerative neurological condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis or SSPE,' which he explained can begin as early as seven years after a measles infection. 'That is a very serious disease that leads to death in almost all cases.' She died from pneumonia — was that caused by measles or was it a secondary infection? 'You can get pneumonia from measles or kids with measles can develop a super infection, meaning bacterial pneumonia on top of measles,' Dr. Ratner tells PEOPLE, explaining that they could also get influenza or COVID. 'It's because they have the original viral infection. That sets them up to have a bacterial infection on top of it.' 'This is a very typical story,' he said. 'Kids with measles can seem like they're getting better and then can develop pneumonia later. Pneumonia can be from measles alone or measles plus a bacterial infection. But in either case, this whole course is preventable by vaccination." Related: RFK Jr. Promotes Vitamin A, Vaccine 'Freedom of Choice' amid 'Rapidly' Expanding Measles Outbreak The family talked about how the other children had breathing treatments and made a point that their daughter who died wasn't offered one. Why would breathing treatments be offered and would they be helpful? 'There's no evidence for either inhaled steroids, which is what budesonide is, or inhaled beta agonists like albuterol in measles,' Dr. Ratner explained. 'There's simply no evidence that they do anything.' As for the other children, whom the parents said benefitted from treatments, Dr. Ratner said 'it sounds like the other children had a more benign course so I think they were simply not as sick.' What about other treatments that have been mentioned, like vitamin A and cod liver oil? Are they helpful in treating or preventing measles? 'The vitamin A thing is a little complicated because there's a kernel of truth in there,' he explained. 'Children who are malnourished are at higher risk of severe courses and death from measles, and we know from studies from decades ago that vitamin A supplementation for people who have measles can decrease — but not eliminate— the risk of death and severe disease.' Dr. Ratner explained that if you're treating a patient with measles, 'it is reasonable to give two doses of vitamin A — just 2 doses, and under the supervision of a doctor — and that can help decrease the risk of severe disease and death from measles. It doesn't prevent either of those things, and it certainly does not prevent people from getting measles.' There is also the risk of taking too much vitamin A, he explained. 'It accumulates in the body. It can cause liver damage. It can cause central nervous system damage. It can cause issues with skin — it is not a benign treatment." And as for cod liver oil, while it 'does, in fact, contain some vitamin A' Dr. Ratner explained, there is 'no evidence that that helps in any way and giving a supplement that has an unknown amount of things in it is unlikely to be helpful.' Related: 'Measles Parties' for Kids Are 'Terrifying' — and Could Have 'Devastating' Effects, Experts Say The mother said she believes she had been vaccinated, and she still developed symptoms of measles. Why would that happen? 'Especially for someone who got a single dose of vaccine, there is some chance that, if they are exposed to measles, they can develop measles,' said Dr. Ratner, who explained that one dose of the MMR vaccine is 'about 93% effective,' and the two-dose regimen is 'about 97% effective.' 'Often those people have milder disease than people who haven't been vaccinated,' he said, 'and it sounds like her course was pretty mild.' What do people need to realize about measles and their risk of infection? 'The only way to prevent measles is by vaccination. The vaccine is safe and it is highly effective, and we have been using it for 60 years at this point,' Dr. Ratner says. 'There is a lot of misinformation out there and what happens when you have that level of of misinformation, is that vaccine rates drop, you end up with large outbreaks like you have in West Texas now.' 'We've lost a child already in this outbreak and an adult has died in New Mexico. Both of those deaths were preventable,' he said. 'Measles is not supposed to be causing deaths in people in the U.S. in 2025, and so this is all preventable.' Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories Read the original article on People
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The shaky science behind treating measles with vitamin A
As a fatal measles outbreak continues to spread, the United States' leading public health official has offered some advice that's not backed by science. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., told Fox News earlier this month that his department was delivering vitamin A to Texas, and that health officials were getting results by treating measles with cod liver oil, a substance that has high levels of vitamins A and D. While vitamin A is, in fact, part of the recommended treatment for measles, 'It's not good advice,' said Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease expert, and member of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Infectious Diseases. 'I think the problem is that he's taken something where there's a kernel of truth, which is that there is an interaction between vitamin A status and measles outcome, and he turned that into vitamin A and vitamin D. He's talking about cod liver oil, which is not how you would supplement someone, in part, because there's not a known amount of vitamin A in that.' Kennedy's advice couldn't have come at a worse time. As of March 18, the Texas Department of Health and Human Services was reporting 279 cases since the end of January, with 36 patients needing hospitalization. One unvaccinated child had died in Texas, while another unvaccinated person died in New Mexico. Cases have been reported in at least seven other states. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 100,000 people, mostly children under the age of five, died of measles globally in 2023. While Kennedy may have been wrong overall, as Ratner noted, there was still a sliver of truth in his statement. Both the CDC and WHO recommend dosing children diagnosed with measles with vitamin A, which is found in foods like carrots, spinach, pumpkins, eggs, milk, sweet potatoes, and mangoes. Numerous studies have found vitamin A is effective in reducing the severity of measles, including lowering mortality rates. According to AAP guidelines, children who test positive for measles should be given two daily doses of vitamin A for two days, with the dosage varying by age. However, many of the studies that concluded vitamin A was an effective treatment were conducted on populations that tend to be malnourished in general. In more developed countries, such as the United States, vitamin A's effectiveness is less clear. A 2021 study conducted in Italy found no significant difference between vitamin A and a placebo in treating children admitted to hospital with measles. Ratner noted that the Italian study suffered from a small sample size, but acknowledged that, 'There's some data on the side of saying that the impact in Italy or somewhere like the United States is likely to be less of giving vitamin A supplementation than it is somewhere with a lot of malnutrition. This goes back to observations from a long time ago that children who were malnourished had much higher rates of severe disease and death from measles than kids who were well nourished.' [ Related: How to check your measles vaccination status amid outbreak. ] The reasons that vitamin A is good for measles are both straightforward and complex. The vitamin 'plays a vital role for immune system functioning,' said Erik Blutinger, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine. 'It helps the body produce antibodies. It helps the body mobilize T cell responses, and it prevents immunity from weakening overall.' Vitamin A is also critical to skin health, as it helps maintain healthy cells in the epidermis, the outermost layer of skin. 'The skin is one of our vital organs and serves as a protective barrier even for our immune system,' adds Blutinger. The trouble with the recent recommendation is that some parents may hear that a little vitamin A is good, so more must be better. As with most medicines, this can be dangerous thinking. In large doses, vitamin A can become toxic. Symptoms can include nausea, vomiting, headaches, and blurred vision. In extreme cases, it can even lead to permanent liver, bone, or nervous system damage. Vitamin A is particularly dangerous 'because it's fat soluble, it gets stored in the liver,' said Ratner. 'It's very easy to give someone too much, and that can either be too much in terms of individual doses or even reasonable doses for too long a period of time. It can endanger the liver, it can endanger the bones. Vitamin A supplementation is great for people who are vitamin A deficient, and it's a reasonable thing to do just for the two doses at the time of measles diagnosis, because we think that there's a potential benefit just during that little window. But it's not something that people should be doing on their own, and it's not something that should be done long term unless there's some very specific medical condition that someone's treating.' In a 2023 article published in the Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians Open, Blutinger noted that there is no antiviral treatment for measles yet available. While two days of vitamin A doses is recommended, followed by another dose several weeks later, the study concluded that the best and surest way to combat the disease remains vaccination. [ Related: Is raw milk safe? Science has a clear answer. ] Beyond vaccinating, the best advice Blutinger could offer parents was to 'be well informed with verifiable information that comes from your primary care doctor and from the medical professionals that do not care about politics.' 'My other advice is to take measles extremely seriously and to do what you can to protect your loved ones, your children, the elderly, everyone around you, because, as we saw during COVID, pandemics are not easily tamed,' he added. 'If measles continues to spread rapidly, we may be in even more serious trouble.'
