Urgent health warning issued for Aussie territory after infected man visited multiple tourist spots
The unnamed man, who is believed to have contracted the virus while overseas in Indonesia, spent several days travelling through parts of the NT while infectious.
He visited multiple hotspots, including national parks, airports, and well-frequented attractions, NT Health said on Saturday.
'The NT Centre for Disease Control is urging Territorians to be alert following confirmation of a measles case who travelled through Darwin and Alice Springs while infectious,' it said.
Authorities have urged anyone who visited affected locations between July 17 and 23 to watch for symptoms including fever, sore eyes, runny nose, a cough, and a blotchy red rash.
Measles is a highly contagious viral illness that can lead to serious health complications and, in some parts of the world, it remains a leading cause of death among children under five years old.
'Check your vaccination status,' an NT Health spokesperson told news.com.au
'Measles is highly contagious but preventable with two doses of a measles-containing vaccine.'
The measles virus is typically spread through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes, with the particles lingering and potentially infecting anyone nearby.
Experts warn that simply being in the same room as an infectious person may suffice to contract the virus.
A person is generally considered infectious from shortly before symptoms appear until four days after the rash develops.
On July 17, the man believed to be infected took part in a full-day tour with Ethical Adventures at Litchfield National Park, NT Health said.
The next day, he departed on an overnight trip with AAPT Kings and dined at the Mercure Kakadu Crocodile Hotel in Jabiru between 6pm and 8pm.
On July 20, he visited the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory from 1pm to 3pm.
Later that afternoon, he travelled through Darwin Airport, departing at 3.30pm on Qantas flight QF1960, and arrived at Alice Springs Airport at 7pm.
Finally, on Tuesday, July 23, the man flew from Alice Springs to Cairns on Air North flight TL361.
According to NT Health, symptoms of measles can take up to 18 days to appear after exposure.
'Anyone who attended these locations during the listed times should monitor for symptoms and seek medical attention if unwell,' the alert said.
'The vaccine is safe and effective, and available from your GP, local health centre, Aboriginal health clinic, and vaccinating pharmacies.'
Measles poses the highest risk to young children, pregnant women, and people with weakened immune systems.
In Australia, a vaccine is available as a combination vaccine containing measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) or measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV).
All children are currently recommended to get vaccinated for measles at 12 and 18 months of age as part of the National Immunisation Program.
Infants can be vaccinated from six months old if travelling overseas, or when an outbreak happens, but will still need two more doses at 12 months and 18 months.
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The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
Deep impact: touring central Australia's cosmic craters
'You didn't mention camping on Mars.' My wife had a point: thin air, thinner soil, extreme UV, rocks straight from a Nasa red-planet image, jagged ranges – all ideal backdrops for a movie set. No wonder the place was considered for training by the Apollo program. Its sparse life forms include an intimidating shrub whose thorns mimic the stingers on the scorpions that come out after dark. A harsh, forbidding place, but beautiful too. We made shade with our camper awning and waited for magic time: the desert at dusk. Travelling along the Stuart Highway it's easy to miss the Henbury Meteorites conservation reserve, 12km off the tarmac along a rough track one and a half hours south of Alice Springs. We'd seen samples of its space rock in the excellent display at the Museum of Central Australia in Alice and were keen to see where they fell. There are six known impact sites in the territory and the two most accessible are Henbury and Tnorala (Gosse Bluff). We visited both during Victoria's fifth Covid lockdown in 2021. Henbury is a site where a nickel-iron meteor about the size of a garden shed disintegrated before striking the land to carve out over a dozen impact craters, just 4,500 years ago – so recently that the site has significant cultural meaning as a sorry place for the Luritja people, whose sacred songs and oral histories tell of this devastating event. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Scientific models suggest the meteorites hit Earth at 40,000km/h in an explosion akin to the Hiroshima blast. The site's 12 craters are best viewed when the sunlight's low angle reveals the smaller, heavily eroded examples. Among the youngest of Earth's known impact sites, Henbury's pits have been scoured by wind and rare deluges down the Finke River flood plain. Extreme temperatures do the rest. The largest crater is 180m across, the smallest the size of a back-yard spa. The explosion sprayed out tonnes of pulverised rock in a distinctive rayed pattern still visible around Crater No 3 – the only known terrestrial example. Temptingly, specimens of the actual meteorite hurled out may still be found. The 45kg chunk in the Museum of Central Australia is one example of 680kg collected so far, though digging or damaging the site without a permit is illegal. We don't find any meteorite fragments but we leave with memories of a humming sunrise and night with a billion almost touchable stars. From Tylers Pass lookout, two hours west along the Namatjira Drive from Alice Springs, Tnorala (Gosse Bluff) appears as a mountain range thrusting incongruously from the endless western plains. In fact, these peaks were created in seconds when an object up to 1km wide hit the Earth at about 250,000km/h, 142m years ago, with an explosive force at least 20 times more powerful than all the world's nuclear weapons. No trace of that object has been found, so it was probably an icy comet that vaporised on impact. Erosion has since reduced the crater from its original 22km diameter. Satellite images uncannily resemble a staring eye under a sunburnt brow. Specimens in the Museum of Central Australia show that early Cretaceous central Australia was wetter and cooler than it is now, with abundant dinosaurs. Locally, they would have been vaporised, and anything living within 100km killed by the massive shock wave and extreme heat. The sound of the explosion probably travelled around the world. The Tnorala bolide event was a prelude to the big one, Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, which wiped out the dinosaurs 77m years later. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion In their oral traditions, Western Arrernte people understand Tnorala as a cosmic impact site. A group of star woman were dancing in a corroboree in the Milky Way when one woman placed her baby in a turna (wooden cradle). The dancing shook the galaxy and the turna slipped, with the baby falling to Earth as a blazing star, striking the ground to create the crater's distinctive bowl shape. These days 'awesome' is a word debased by glib use. It's apt driving into the 5km-wide Tnorala crater, surrounded by cliffs 180 metres high, formed in a blink by a literally Earth-shattering event as our planet's crust rebounded to form the crater's inner ring. The rock strata in these peaks show that some were lifted from a depth of 4km by incredible explosive force and are now inverted. It's not just awareness of this ancient violence that marks Tnorala as a sorry place. Local information boards describe it as a pre-colonial massacre site. So it's doubly proper that camping is forbidden. It's an unwelcoming place, where an object large enough to be classified as a city-killer fell from the sky. This kind of comet is now thankfully detectable by telescopes such as the new Vera C Rubin observatory in Chile, and also proven as feasible they could be steered off course. So forget Mars. Cancel that ticket. Instead, visit awesome central Australia – where the mountains are upside down, the stars greet your fingertips and the dawns are so silent you can hear the sun sing. The Museum of Central Australia is hosting a Henbury Meteorite reserve discovery day on 10 August as part of National Science week. Henbury: Day trips to the Henbury Meteorites conservation reserve require a Northern Territory parks pass and the site can be reached by 2WD vehicles, however 4WDs are recommended. The reserve's basic facilities include picnic shelters and a drop toilet. Water and firewood are not available. Campsites must be booked online through Northern Territory Parks and fees apply. The nearest food and fuel supplies are available 85km south at the Erldunda Roadhouse on the Stuart Highway. Tnorala (Gosse Bluff): The Tnorala crater is accessible via a sandy track and offers picnic shelters and a drop toilet. Camping is not permitted in the reserve due to its status as a registered sacred site of the Western Arrernte people. Fuel and food is available at Hermannsburg, 62km east on the Namatjira Way. Travel beyond Tnorala is by 4WD only and requires a Mereenie Tour pass. Many of these roads may be impassable in wet weather. Associate Prof Duane Hamacher assisted with factchecking for this story
Sky News
a day ago
- Sky News
Why are child vaccination rates the lowest they have been in more than a decade?
Child vaccination uptake is the lowest it has been in more than a decade, with a death from measles in Liverpool reigniting calls for increased awareness of the dangers of not getting jabs. A report from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) this month reiterated that none of the routine child vaccinations have met the World Health Organisation's recommended target of 95% since 2021. Uptake in some local authorities is as low as 60%, while the England-wide rate for the final quarter of 2024/25 for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) was 88.8%, down from 92.7% 10 years ago. The latest UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) figures show there were 145 new measles cases in England in July. With outbreaks across Europe and elsewhere, public health officials are concerned families may bring the virus back to the UK when they return to school from the summer holidays. We look at why vaccination rates have declined, and the reasons some parents are still hesitant to get their children immunised. When did uptake start declining - and where is it worst now? Routine childhood vaccinations largely consist of the 6-in-1 vaccine, which covers diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, Hib, and hepatitis B; the MMR vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella; and the MenB vaccine, which covers the meningococcal group B bacterium that can cause meningitis and sepsis. They are all administered free of charge across two or three doses before children are five, with most in the first year. WHO recommends countries set targets of 95% coverage of all three to ensure herd immunity and to protect those who are immunocompromised and cannot have the vaccines themselves. In the UK, MMR rates have consistently been the lowest. The most recent decline began in 2013/14, when uptake at two years peaked at 92.7%. Overall, they have been lower in England than Scotland and Wales, with areas such as London and the North West seeing particularly low levels. In Hackney, east London, only 60% of children had received both their MMR jabs by their fifth birthday in the year 2023/24. The North West, and Liverpool in particular, also had lower uptake, with only 73% vaccinated against MMR by the age of five. Of the 674 measles cases reported in 2025, almost half (48%) have been in London, 16% in the North West, and 10% in the East of England. At local authority level, the most cases were reported in Hackney (12%), Bristol (7%), and Salford (5%), with almost all cases concentrated in either children under 10 or teenagers and young adults. 1:04 Why have rates declined? Although the recent drop began a decade ago, a much sharper decline happened in the 1990s. It saw the two-year MMR uptake in England go from 91.8% in 1995/96 to 79.9% in 2003/04. In 2006, person-to-person measles transmission was re-established in the UK, and a year later, rates exceeded 1,000 for the first time in 10 years. This came after the British doctor Andrew Wakefield published a now-discredited report in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet in 1998, which linked the MMR vaccine to autism. The study was reported by media outlets worldwide and resulted in the safety of the jab being questioned. After it proved baseless, The Lancet retracted the study in 2010. Wakefield was banned from practising medicine after being found guilty of dishonesty and the "abuse" of developmentally delayed children by subjecting them to unnecessary and invasive medical procedures without ethical approval. However, hesitancy around childhood vaccinations persisted. Professor Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds, says: "As widely debunked as it was, it set the cat among the pigeons and poisoned everything." 1:34 What could be behind the latest drop? The increased prevalence of vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic saw a resurgence in "anti-vax" sentiment, with many questioning the quick rollout of the jabs. Others pushed back against mandatory vaccines in certain settings, such as health and social care in the UK, and across most federal government departments in the US, citing a breach of freedom of choice. Hesitancy also proved stronger in some minority communities, which experts have linked to a general mistrust in healthcare services due to the disproportionate outcomes experienced by those groups. "Well-organised and well-funded anti-vaccine movements latched onto mRNA (messenger RNA) vaccines, because while it's not a brand new technology, COVID was the first time they had been used en masse," Professor Griffin says. "There was a lot of disinformation around them, and they just seized on it." However, WHO had already highlighted "vaccine hesitancy" as one of the top 10 global health threats in 2019, before the pandemic began. Some of this was attributed to Wakefield's study. Separately, with the rise of social media and misinformation, unevidenced conspiracy theories around vaccines have circulated, such as them being used by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to track people's movements. More recently, US President Donald Trump has expressed sentiments that nod to views shared by vaccine sceptics. In an interview with Time Magazine in 2024, he was asked if he would consider ending childhood vaccination programmes in the US. He said he would have a "big discussion" with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who he appointed as his health secretary and who has consistently expressed vaccine sceptic views. Mr Trump said: "The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible. If you look at things that are happening, there's something causing it." While not directly referencing it, his comments appeared to echo the baseless claims made in Wakefield's study. Professor Griffin says that "reputable" figures, such as politicians and scientists who continue to endorse the view of Wakefield, and other false narratives around vaccine efficacy, have legitimised the anti-vax movement and "normalised" the decision not to immunise children. "They've essentially said 'there's no smoke without fire' and drawn attention to a question that they've created themselves," he says. "It's really upsetting because we've got this brilliant vaccine that people aren't taking because of basic nonsense, and that has serious consequences. A person infected with measles is likely to infect between 15 and 20 others if they are unvaccinated. "But the MMR vaccine is a victim of its own success. Measles was a large cause of infant mortality before we had the vaccine, but now people don't remember why we tried to make vaccines against it in the first place. "So we need to educate people because they aren't aware of how dangerous it is." 1:30 'Lack of access' One children's health expert told Sky News the main issue is a lack of access. Helen Bedford, a professor of children's health at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute, says everything from knowing how to book an appointment, to having the means to get there can be a barrier to children getting vaccinated. "People may not know when vaccines are due, how to make an appointment, then there's actually getting to the appointment," she says. "For some parents who are suffering the impact of poverty, paying a bus fare to get your child to a GP surgery may be a step too far, even though they understand vaccination is very important." A shortage of health visitors and other staff who can answer questions from vaccine-hesitant parents is also having an impact, she says. "We want parents to ask questions but unfortunately, due to lack of personnel, they can't always get answers or even an opportunity to have a discussion," she said.
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Deep impact: touring central Australia's cosmic craters
'You didn't mention camping on Mars.' My wife had a point: thin air, thinner soil, extreme UV, rocks straight from a Nasa red-planet image, jagged ranges – all ideal backdrops for a movie set. No wonder the place was considered for training by the Apollo program. Its sparse life forms include an intimidating shrub whose thorns mimic the stingers on the scorpions that come out after dark. A harsh, forbidding place, but beautiful too. We made shade with our camper awning and waited for magic time: the desert at dusk. Travelling along the Stuart Highway it's easy to miss the Henbury Meteorites conservation reserve, 12km off the tarmac along a rough track 1.5 hours south of Alice Springs. We'd seen samples of its space rock in the excellent display at the Museum of Central Australia in Alice and were keen to see where they fell. There are six known impact sites in the Territory and the two most accessible are Henbury and Tnorala (Gosse Bluff). We visited both during Victoria's fifth Covid lockdown in 2021. Henbury is a site where a nickel-iron meteor about the size of a garden shed disintegrated before striking the land to carve out over a dozen impact craters, just 4,500 years ago – so recently that the site has significant cultural meaning as a sorry place for the Luritja people, whose sacred songs and oral histories tell of this devastating event. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Scientific models suggest the meteorites hit Earth at 40,000km/h in an explosion akin to the Hiroshima blast. The site's 12 craters are best viewed when the sunlight's low angle reveals the smaller, heavily eroded examples. Though among the youngest of Earth's known impact sites, Henbury's pits have been scoured by wind and rare deluges down the Finke River flood plain. Extreme temperatures do the rest. The largest crater is 180m across, the smallest the size of a back yard spa. The explosion sprayed out tonnes of pulverised rock in a distinctive rayed pattern still visible around Crater No.3 – the only known terrestrial example. Temptingly, specimens of the actual meteorite hurled out with this ejecta may still be found. The 45kg chunk in the Museum of Central Australia is one example of 680kg collected so far, though digging or damaging the site without a permit is illegal. We don't find any meteorite fragments, but we leave with memories of a humming sunrise and night with a billion almost touchable stars. From Tylers Pass lookout, two hours west along the Namatjira Drive from Alice Springs, Tnorala (Gosse Bluff) appears as a mountain range thrusting incongruously from the endless western plains. In fact, these peaks were created in seconds when an object up to 1km wide hit the Earth at around 250,000km/h, 142m years ago, with an explosive force at least 20 times more powerful than all the world's nuclear weapons. No trace of that object has been found, so it was likely an icy comet that vaporised on impact. Erosion has since reduced the crater from its original 22km diameter. Satellite images uncannily resemble a staring eye under a sunburnt brow. Specimens in the Museum of Central Australia show that early Cretaceous central Australia was wetter and cooler than it is now, with abundant dinosaurs. Locally, they would have been vaporised, and anything living within 100km killed by the massive shock wave and extreme heat. The sound of the explosion likely travelled around the world. The Tnorala bolide event was a prelude to the big one, Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, which wiped out the dinosaurs 77m years later. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion In their oral traditions, Western Arrernte people understand Tnorala as a cosmic impact site. A group of star woman were dancing in a corroboree in the Milky Way when one woman placed her baby in a turna (wooden cradle). The dancing shook the galaxy and the turna slipped, with the baby falling to Earth as a blazing star, striking the ground to create the crater's distinctive bowl shape. These days 'awesome' is a word debased by glib use. It's apt driving into the 5km-wide Tnorala crater, surrounded by cliffs 180 metres high, formed in a blink by a literally Earth-shattering event as our planet's crust rebounded to form the crater's inner ring. The rock strata in these peaks show that some were lifted from a depth of 4km by incredible explosive force, and are now inverted. It's not just awareness of this ancient violence that marks Tnorala as a sorry place. Local information boards describe it as a pre-colonial massacre site. So it's doubly proper that camping is forbidden. It's an unwelcoming place, where an object large enough to be classified as a city-killer fell from the sky. This kind of comet is now thankfully detectable by telescopes such as the new Vera C Rubin observatory in Chile, and also proven as feasible to steer off course. So forget Mars. Cancel that ticket. Instead visit awesome central Australia – where the mountains are upside down, the stars greet your fingertips and the dawns are so silent you can hear the sun sing. The Museum of Central Australia is hosting a Henbury Meteorite reserve discovery day on 10 August as part of National Science week. Henbury: Day trips to the Henbury Meteorites conservation reserve require a Northern Territory parks pass and the site can be reached by 2WD vehicles, however 4WDs are recommended. The reserve's basic facilities include picnic shelters and a drop toilet. Water and firewood are not available. Campsites must be booked online through Northern Territory Parks and fees apply. The nearest food and fuel supplies are available 85km south at the Erldunda Roadhouse on the Stuart Highway. Tnorala (Gosse Bluff): The Tnorala crater is accessible via a sandy track and offers picnic shelters and a drop toilet. Camping is not permitted in the reserve due to its status as a registered sacred site of the Western Arrernte people. Fuel and food is available at Hermannsburg, 62km east on the Namatjira Way. Travel beyond Tnorala is by 4WD only and requires a Mereenie Tour pass. Many of these roads may be impassable in wet weather. Associate Prof Duane Hamacher assisted with fact-checking for this story
