✉️ Send letters to PHAC and health ministers to voice your support for access to the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine this fall. Use our online tool to send emails.
Comments closedAugust 22, 2024 (Vancouver, BC) – On September 15, 2024, a coalition of community groups will present Vancouver’s second annual Clean Air Festival. From 1-6:30 pm, Clean Air 604, Clean Air in BC Schools, DoNoHarm BC, Masks 4 East Van, Millions Missing BC, Protect Our Province BC, SolidAIRity GVRD, Safe Schools Coalition BC, Spring Vancouver, and Vancouver Still Cares will join forces to present a COVID-safer, immuno-inclusive hybrid event, taking place in-person at Slocan Park and digitally via livestream and recording.
The event features a DIY air purifier-building workshop, tabling, children’s games and activities from 1:00 pm, with a stage magic performance at 3:45 pm and an outdoor concert from 4:30 pm. Masks, rapid tests, zines and DIY fit test kits will be available while supplies last. Air purifiers from the workshop will be donated to schools via Clean Air in BC Schools, and to vulnerable community members via Masks 4 East Van.
Comments closedCOVID-19 is surging in parts of North America and Europe, and even played a role in ending the presidential campaign of 81-year-old Joe Biden, who was infected for the third time last month.
Nevertheless, on Wednesday the Ontario government shut down its early warning system to detect COVID and other emerging diseases.
Doctors, citizens and researchers are calling the decision to kill the province’s wastewater disease surveillance program both wrong-headed and dangerous. Ending the program will make it harder to track and thwart viral outbreaks, they say, and thereby increase the burden on Ontario’s understaffed hospitals, which experienced more than 1,000 emergency room closures last year.
“Pandemics do not end because science has been muzzled,” Dr. Iris Gorfinkel, a well-known Toronto physician and clinical researcher, told the CBC.
In emails to politicians, more than 5,000 citizens have demanded restoration of the program, with little effect.
Comments closed✉️ Send letters to MPPs to voice your support for wastewater monitoring. Use our online tool to send emails.
Why take action? Wastewater monitoring is an essential public health tool that provides insights into the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses in Ontario’s communities.
Comments closed📱 Call MPPs to voice your support for wastewater monitoring.
✉️ Use our online tool to send letters to MPPs.
✉️ Use our online tool to send emails to municipal councillors in Ottawa or Waterloo Region.
📸 Post photos on social media.
Why take action? Wastewater monitoring is an essential public health tool that provides insights into the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses in Ontario’s communities.
Comments closedThe virus that causes COVID-19 can breach the protective blood-retinal barrier, leading to potential long-term consequences in the eye, new research shows.
The blood-retinal barrier is designed to protect our vision from infections by preventing microbial pathogens from reaching the retina where they could trigger an inflammatory response with potential vision loss.
Comments closedWednesday, April 17, 2024 (British Columbia) – Independent public health groups Protect Our Province BC, DoNoHarm BC, and Masks4EastVan are calling on the BC government to restore healthcare mask requirements. They are urging British Columbians to call for airborne pathogen protections in clinical settings by joining DoNoHarm BC’s campaign.
Comments closedImplementation of ventilation standards of at least five clean-air changes per hour, COVID-19 testing, the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), and universal wearing of respirators prevented most SARS-CoV-2 transmissions in a California healthcare system from 2020 to 2022, suggests a study published yesterday in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
For the study, University of California (UC) researchers used electronic health records and movement data of patients and staff to conduct viral genomic and social network analyses to estimate COVID-19 spread in the UC–San Diego Health system. The team analyzed 12,933 viral genomes from 35,666 infected patients and healthcare workers (HCWs) (out of 1,303,622 tests [2.7%]) from November 2020 to January 2022.
Comments closedComments closedThe tide is turning. Thanks to all the people making noise on social media and bugging their families, while continuing to wear masks and build air purifiers no matter what anyone says, there’s a trace of hope.
You wouldn’t attend an outdoor party where measles or smallpox was present. Covid is no different, especially now.
Comments closedCW: cancer, surgery, medical negligence, denial of care, disability grief
As part of DoNoHarm BC’s #Postcards4PublicHealth campaign, we’ve invited British Columbians to share their stories about the lack of Covid safety in BC – particularly the loss of mask protections in healthcare. Many wrote directly to policy makers. Some generously gave us permission to share their stories with the public and the press.
Comments closedDo not listen to powers that be who pretend that getting infected with COVID multiple times is now no big deal. They’re asking you to lower your guard for a nasty virus that can invade the brain, disregulate the immune system and damage the vascular system.
This strategy has led to predictable results — more direct deaths, more excess deaths, more disease and some 1.4 million Canadians reporting some form of long COVID over the last two years.
Comments closedBrain fog isn’t like a hangover or depression. It’s a disorder of executive function that makes basic cognitive tasks absurdly hard.
Comments closedYou would think that the return of a Kennedy scion to the White House would be a moment to celebrate, at least for many of a particular political stripe. But the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the new Trump administration has left many aghast, especially doctors, scientists, and educators.
Despite president John F. Kennedy having famously championed the polio vaccine, his nephew, RFK Jr., is an avowed anti-vaccination zealot, blaming a host of repeatedly unproven ills on such inoculations.
Comments closedThe teenager hospitalized with bird flu in British Columbia, Canada, may have a variation of the virus that has a mutation making it more transmissible among people, early data shows – a warning of what the virus can do that is especially worrisome in countries such as the US where some H5N1 cases are not being detected.
The US “absolutely” is not testing and monitoring bird flu cases enough, which means scientists could miss mutated cases like these, said Richard Webby, a virologist at St Jude children’s research hospital’s department of infectious diseases.
Comments closedThe genetic sequence of the H5N1 bird flu virus that infected a teenager in British Columbia shows that the virus had undergone mutational changes that would make it easier for that version of H5N1 to infect people, scientists who have studied the data say.
There’s currently no evidence the teenager, who remains in critical condition in hospital, infected anyone else. If that’s the case, it is likely this mutated version of the virus would die out when the teen’s illness resolves. The source of the teen’s infection has not been determined, so it’s impossible to know for sure if the mutations were in the virus that infected him or her. But scientists think it is more likely that the mutations developed during the course of his or her infection.
Comments closedOver the weekend California reported the first known clade 1 mpox case in the United States, which involves someone who recently returned from an affected African country and sought care in San Mateo County.
Health officials from the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) have not confirmed if the infection is cause by clade 1b, a more transmissible and severe mpox virus causing a widespread outbreak that started in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Comments closedKingston Secondary School will have its automated heating, ventilation and air conditioning system inspected next week following the publication of a student-written article that found the concentration of carbon dioxide in the school exceeded safe levels.
Principal Darren Seymour sent a letter to students, staff and parents last week in response to the article that appeared in “The Bears Bulletin.”
Comments closedDonald Trump’s nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr as US secretary of health and human services has prompted widespread criticisms towards Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist who has embraced a slew of other debunked health-related conspiracy theories.
Comments closedLong before the COVID-19 pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was building up a following with his anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, and becoming one of the world’s most influential spreaders of fear and distrust around vaccines.
Now, President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which regulates vaccines.
Comments closedWorking days lost to long Covid could be costing the economy billions of pounds every year as patients struggle to cope with symptoms and return to work, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.
Comments closedA Canadian teenager who is in critical condition after contracting H5N1 bird flu was infected with a version of the virus that is different from the one circulating in dairy cattle in the United States, Canadian authorities announced Wednesday.
The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg confirmed the infection was indeed caused by the H5N1 virus. But genetic sequencing showed that it is of a genotype that has been found in wild birds, not the version that has been circulating in dairy cattle in the U.S.
Comments closedFederal health officials have confirmed that a B.C. teen who is currently in hospital has Canada’s first human case of H5N1 avian flu.
Testing at the national microbiology labaratory in Winnipeg confirmed the case Wednesday, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Comments closedCarolyn Law didn’t think much of it when a snow goose landed in her Richmond, B.C., backyard, on Halloween.
But hours later it had barely moved. Then it started bobbing its head repeatedly. About eight hours after she first saw the bird, it rolled over, began convulsing and died.
Comments closedThe first report from a Royal Commission of Inquiry to review New Zealand’s response to the COVID pandemic was due to be released this month.
But the coalition government plans to withhold it, potentially until a second phase of the inquiry (with a new set of questions and commissioners) can be completed in 2026.
Comments closedA British Columbia (BC) teen from the Fraser Health region who was hospitalized with an earlier announced presumptive positive H5 avian flu infection is in critical condition, the province’s top health official said today.
In a media briefing streamed live on Canada’s Global News, Bonnie Henry, MD, BC’s health officer, shared the latest investigation findings, noting that the patient’s symptoms began on November 2, and he or she was seen that day at a hospital emergency room. She said initial symptoms included conjunctivitis, fever, and cough.
Comments closedB.C.’s provincial health officer says the teenager who has tested positive for bird flu is in critical condition in B.C. Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Bonnie Henry says the teenager, who has the first presumptive human case of bird flu contracted in Canada, was admitted to hospital late Friday. B.C. tests last week confirmed the teenager has the virus, but are waiting confirmation from a national laboratory in Winnipeg.
Comments closedComments closedDuring his last time in office, Trump botched the pandemic response, he spread misinformation everywhere, he contributed to restricting access to reproductive health care, he tried to repeal [the Affordable Care Act] and he set the world back on climate action. For me, it’s extremely worrying to have someone in charge with such a poor track record on health and science.
British Columbia health officials are investigating what’s believed to be Canada’s first human case of avian influenza after a teenager tested presumptively positive for the disease, the Ministry of Health announced Saturday.
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