Elisabeth Malkin

According to a study by forensic pathologists at the Medical University of South Carolina, Raniya had a condition called arteriovenous malformation, a tangle of abnormal blood vessels in the brain, and died after one of them ruptured.

There was no sign that the fight contributed to her death, said Duffie Stone, a county prosecutor, and he would not be filing any criminal charges.

The death of Raniya, a fifth grader, caused an outpouring of grief and made national headlines, with her parents and many others demanding answers for how an elementary school could have allowed a fight to lead to a child’s death.

But county officials said that was not what occurred.

“There was no evidence of trauma on or inside the body,” Stone said. “There were no bruises, no cuts, no scrapes, no busted lips, no black eyes.”

The only internal trauma was linked to the ruptured blood vessel inside the brain, he said.

Headaches are a symptom of the condition Raniya had, and she had complained of headaches and dizziness seven times over the past two years, Stone said at a news conference.

Raniya had been involved in a short “slap fight” in her classroom March 25, the day she collapsed, Sheriff R.A. Strickland of Colleton County said at the news conference.

The fight occurred at Forest Hills Elementary School in Walterboro, South Carolina, about an hour west of Charleston. Raniya died two days later.

Her mother, Ashley Wright, said that Raniya had been bullied in her class. On Facebook, Wright posted a photo of her kissing her daughter’s cheek, as Raniya lay in a hospital bed, wearing a neck brace and hooked up to tubes.

“Stay woke PARENTS!” she wrote.

After the news Friday, there was no immediate response from Raniya’s parents, but supporters writing on Wright’s Facebook page quickly expressed skepticism that the child could have died from natural causes.

“The full truth WILL come out,” wrote one person, Ceryl DeLong King.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/us/raniya-wright-death-natural-causes.html" id="4fd6b3a4-8390-3cce-a34a-910740c14c67">The New York Times</a>.

The death of Raniya Wright, the 10-year-old girl who collapsed after a fight at her South Carolina elementary school in March, was caused by a medical condition she was born with, officials said Friday.

Raniya Wright, 10, Died of Natural Causes, Not Because of School Fight, Officials Say

Health authorities reported 90 additional cases as of April 11, with outbreaks in New York, Washington, California, New Jersey and Michigan. Those cases were largely linked to travelers returning from countries seeing outbreaks of their own, including Israel, Ukraine and the Philippines.

The disease then spread through populations in which large numbers of people are unvaccinated, the CDC said.

The number of new cases has been climbing each week, according to the agency’s numbers. There were 90 new cases last week, up from 78 the week before.

During the last major outbreak, in 2014, there were 667 cases during the whole year.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/health/measles-outbreak.html" id="0525a17e-78b9-349f-ab5f-a16f40bb6a1f">The New York Times</a>.

The number of new measles cases in the United States rose again this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday, bringing the total number to 555 in 2019. This year’s outbreak is on course to be the worst since measles was eliminated as an endemic disease in 2000.

90 New Cases of Measles Reported as Outbreak Continues Record Pace

At an age when most children are careening across the living room, 2-year-old Cillian was stuck, held back by a genetic condition that delays his physical and cognitive development and a Catch-22 requirement from his family’s insurance provider.

Then a tip from Cillian’s physical therapist led his parents, Krissy and Tyler Jackson, who live in Farmington, Minnesota, to a website that provided a model for retrofitting toy cars to give mobility to children with disabilities.

Tyler Jackson contacted the robotics team at Farmington High School, and the students took up the challenge.

In less than a month, Cillian was on the move.

The story touched a chord, and a report by a Minnesota television station, KARE-TV, was picked up by news outlets across the country, replaying a video of Cillian demonstrating his skills to beaming students on the robotics team, Rogue Robotics, during a return visit last week.

What seemed like an intractable problem for the family was ultimately solved by a combination of customized technology and teenage enthusiasm.

“Those kids are so smart and so compassionate,” Krissy Jackson said. “They were so thrilled to see that the work that they had done made a difference.”

The Jacksons had faced a quandary. Their insurance and state medical assistance would pay for an electric wheelchair.

Cillian would have to show that he had mastered the self-control to maneuver the bulky mechanism. But children learn by doing, as anyone who has watched a toddler endlessly repeat the same action knows. Cillian did not have that option.

The robotics team provided Cillian with his battery-powered vehicle just before Christmas, and since then, Krissy Jackson said, “he is definitely more curious.” The family has two Corgis, and a giggling Cillian likes to chase them in his motorized chair and watch them jump out of the way.

“It’s him kind of gaining control,” added Krissy Jackson, who works in college administration. “It’s something that he doesn’t have the option to do otherwise.”

At Farmington High School, which Tyler Jackson, a software engineer, attended, the robotics team is part of a league that competes statewide to build a 125-pound robot every year.

Building the lightweight device for Cillian with a modified seat and controls, along with a harness, gave the students a new sense of purpose.

“Robotics is great for teaching,” said Brandon Herrera, a 17-year-old junior who is a programmer on the team. “It doesn’t really show you a whole lot about what is going on and what you can do after robotics.”

“It’s not all about winning,” he added.

The Rogue Robotics team used a design developed by GoBabyGo!, a research team at the University of Delaware that shares its findings to allow other universities and schools to build their own made-to-measure mobility tools.

The Jacksons told the robotics team about the university’s research, according to its coach, Spencer Elvebak, and the students redirected the skills they had honed in competition to retool a Power Wheels chair for Cillian.

“It looked right in our wheelhouse,” Elvebak said.

Cole Galloway, a professor in the department of physical therapy at the University of Delaware, first conceived of modifying off-the-shelf toy cars more than a decade ago.

Since then, 7,000 to 8,000 cars have been built across the world using his team’s design and engineering, he estimated. “It has been a crazy crowdsourcing,” he said. “We call it a movement. We kind of consider ourselves mobility activists.”

Galloway’s goal is to reach 30,000 children in the United States with the modified cars, he said. “Most of these kids have never moved on their own,” he said. “The World Health Organization and the United Nations consider mobility and play for kids a human right. We take that very seriously.”

How would it be possible to reach so many additional families? The University of Delaware team says it will soon share a curriculum for schools that is meant to spread the research to younger students interested in science and technology.

“If a robotics club can outperform the medical industry, that could send a shock,” Galloway said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/robotics-wheelchair.html" id="6a09a30a-34bd-39c9-a009-8b5557dd9d8d">The New York Times</a>.

It took Rogue Robotics to get Cillian Jackson his wheels.

A Robotics Team Built a Toddler a Wheelchair. Now He's Chasing His Corgis Around.

There was no sign that the fight contributed to her death, said Duffie Stone, a county prosecutor who said he would not be filing any charges.

But Raniya’s mother and grandfather responded to the medical report with disbelief.

“For three weeks, we were waiting, this is what we get, a cover-up,” said her grandfather, Ernest Wright, speaking at a separate news conference after county officials announced the findings. “Natural causes did not trigger my granddaughter to die.”

What caused the blood vessel rupture that day? he asked. “There was a reason.”

Raniya’s mother, Ashley Wright, said her daughter had been active and healthy, playing a full basketball season. She said she had never been aware of any health problems until her daughter collapsed.

“I’m going to find out what happened to my baby,” she said.

Ashley Wright said that Raniya had been bullied in her class. On Facebook, Wright posted a photo of her kissing her daughter’s cheek, as Raniya lay in a hospital bed, wearing a neck brace and hooked up to tubes.

Wright on Friday repeated her charge that her daughter had been bullied, saying that the same girl had been harassing Raniya since she was in third grade.

“What’s going to be done about it?” she asked. “Whose child is going to be next with this same girl?”

Raniya wright, 10, died of natural causes, not because of school fight, officials say

Health authorities reported 90 additional cases as of Thursday, with outbreaks in New York, Washington, California, New Jersey and Michigan, up from 78 the week before. Those cases were largely linked to travelers returning from countries seeing outbreaks of their own, including Israel, Ukraine and the Philippines.

More than half the cases this year were reported in New York City, where the latest number was 285. In Rockland County, to the north of the city, health authorities updated their count Monday to 186 cases.

The U.S. outbreaks come as the incidence of measles is rising all over the world, according to preliminary numbers from the World Health Organization. Reported cases tripled globally in the first three months of 2019 compared with the year before, the WHO, a U.N. agency, said Monday.

The WHO said every region of the world was experiencing outbreaks, both in poor countries with low vaccination rates such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and wealthier countries like the United States and Israel, where the agency said the disease had spread among unvaccinated communities.

“This is a very unforgiving disease,” said Dr. Saad Omer, a researcher at the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta who studies immunization coverage and disease incidence. The illness killed close to 110,000 people worldwide in 2017, according to the WHO.

The global spike in measles reverses a celebrated public health achievement. A worldwide effort succeeded in bringing down measles cases by nearly 80 percent from 2000 to 2016.

Experts attribute the new outbreaks to several causes. Enduring poverty limits access to the vaccine in countries with threadbare public health systems. This is compounded by rumors that the vaccines are harmful, leading parents to refuse to vaccinate their children.

“It’s rarely a single cause,” Omer said.

The WHO warned that “measles is one of the world’s most contagious diseases, with the potential to be extremely severe.”

“The disease is entirely preventable through two doses of a safe and effective vaccine,” the statement added.

Epidemiologists say that a vaccination level of 95 percent is needed to prevent outbreaks, but global coverage of the first dose remains at 85 percent, the WHO said.

In the United States, authorities said in 2000 that domestic measles had been eliminated, and the cases that have occurred since then have been traced to visitors returning from countries where outbreaks have occurred.

The size and spread of the outbreaks this year do not come as a total surprise, Omer said, because vaccination refusal rates have been rising in the United States.

In a study that Omer and his colleagues published in 2016, researchers warned that the risk of outbreaks would increase as the overall pool of unvaccinated children swelled.

Omer compared the increase to filling a bucket with water. “A bucket is a small vessel,” he said. “If you keep adding water, it sometimes splashes.”

The population is hovering close to the vaccination threshold below which outbreaks are possible.

“What do you start seeing after that happens? You start seeing more frequent outbreaks, and their size increases,” he said.

During the last major outbreak in the United States, in 2014, there were 667 cases during the whole year.

Omer said there was a possibility that endemic measles could return to the United States, “but it’s not inevitable.”

School mandates are quite effective in the United States, he said, and the CDC, working with local health authorities, is able to play a firefighting role.

But, he warned, “there is a limit to that capacity.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="0525a17e-78b9-349f-ab5f-a16f40bb6a1f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/health/measles-outbreak.html">The New York Times</a>.

90 new cases of measles reported as outbreak continues record pace

The number of new measles cases in the United States rose again this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday, bringing the total number to 555 in 2019. This year’s outbreak is on course to be the worst since the country eliminated measles as an endemic disease in 2000.

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