Month: April 2025

Seniors 75 and over invited to get COVID-19 vaccine

Published by: La Presse / The Canadian Press
Published on: April 14, 2025
By Katrine Desautels

(Montreal) A COVID-19 vaccination campaign is launched this spring for people at risk of developing complications, Santé Québec announced on Monday.

Teams are currently deployed in the province’s long-term care homes, after which vaccination will be offered in private seniors’ residences (RPA) with a more vulnerable clientele.

In addition to CHSLDs and RPAs, seniors 75 years of age or older and people with immunodeficiency or dialysis are encouraged to go get their vaccine dose. This vaccination campaign also aims to reach people aged 65-74 who live with a chronic disease or in remote and isolated areas.

Non-targeted people aged 6 months and older can also receive the COVID-19 vaccine free of charge, says Santé Québec. If they have already been vaccinated, they should wait at least six months after their vaccine before receiving a new dose.

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cognitive issues

Is Covid Rewriting the Rules of Aging? Brain Decline Alarms Doctors

Published April 14, 2025

Published by: The Wall Street Journal
Published on: April 14, 2025
By Sumathi Reddy

Five years after the pandemic’s start, millions of Americans are still struggling with long-lasting symptoms of Covid-19. Cognitive difficulties are among the most troubling and common symptoms in people both old and young.

These ailments can be severe enough to leave former professionals like Ken Todd unable to work and even diagnosed with a form of mild cognitive impairment.

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anti-vaxxers

Health secretary RFK Jr. declares certain vaccines have ‘never worked,’ flummoxing scientists

Published April 10, 2025

Published by: STAT
Published on: April 10, 2025
By Helen Branswell

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has expressed another unorthodox view on vaccines, with the long-time vaccine critic declaring that vaccines for respiratory bugs that target a sole part of the pathogen they are meant to protect against do not work.

The claim was dismissed as erroneous by vaccine experts, who were befuddled by the secretary’s theory, espoused during an interview with CBS News.

Kennedy made the claim in explaining a controversial recent decision by political appointees at the Food and Drug Administration to delay granting a full license to Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine, which is still given under an emergency use authorization or EUA.

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Ontario

Ontario measles case count exceeds 800 total infections, 155 new since last week

Published April 10, 2025

Published by: The Canadian Press
Published on: April 10, 2025
By Hannah Alberga

TORONTO – Ontario is reporting 155 new measles cases over the last week, pushing the province’s case count to 816 since an outbreak began in the fall.

The number of new cases has increased again after a few weeks of appearing to stabilize in the 100-per-week range, which public health physicians had taken as a sign of potential optimism.

Dr. Sarah Wilson, public health physician at Public Health Ontario, says the fact that Ontario has exceeded 800 cases is striking.

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war on science

How Trump 2.0 is slashing NIH-backed research — in charts

Published April 10, 2025

Published by: Nature
Published on: April 10, 2025
By Max Kozlov, Chris Ryan

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has terminated nearly 800 research projects at a breakneck pace, wiping out significant chunks of funding to entire scientific fields, finds a Nature analysis of the unprecedented cuts.

The administration of US President Donald Trump began purging NIH-funded studies on topics that it deems problematic less than 50 days ago, continuously expanding its list to include research on topics ranging from COVID-19 to misinformation. Hundreds of the 30,000-plus scientists funded by the NIH yearly have been forced to halt their work after receiving notices that their research “no longer effectuates agency priorities”, and some have had to fire personnel or even shut down their laboratories.

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long COVID

Studies: 1 in 7 US working-age adults report long COVID, with heaviest burden on the poor

Published April 9, 2025

Published by: CIDRAP
Published on: April 9, 2025
By Mary Van Beusekom

Nearly 1 in 7 working-age US adults had experienced long COVID by late 2023, and socially disadvantaged adults were over 150% more likely to have persistent symptoms, two new studies find.

Future public health, economic burdens

Yesterday in Communications Medicine, Daniel Kim, MD, DrPH, of Northeastern University, analyzed data from the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey from September and November 2022 and August to October 2023 on more than 375,000 US adults, including nearly 50,000 with self-reported long COVID.

Kim assessed sociodemographic and socioeconomic factors as predictors of long COVID; estimated the risk of unemployment, financial difficulties, and anxiety and depression among working-age adults (ages 18 to 64 years) and those currently experiencing lingering symptoms; and tallied the economic effects of the resulting lost wages.

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long COVID

Tackling the ‘silent pandemic’: breakthrough study puts first long COVID treatment on horizon

Published April 8, 2025

Published by: WEHI
Published on: April 9, 2025

Researchers have shown a new drug compound can prevent long COVID symptoms in mice – a landmark finding that could lead to a future treatment for the debilitating condition.

The world-first study found mice treated with the antiviral compound, developed by a multidisciplinary research team at WEHI, were protected from long term brain and lung dysfunction – key symptoms of long COVID.

Researchers hope the unprecedented results could lead to clinical trials and the first treatment for the disease in the future.

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Toronto

Airborne Danger

Published April 4, 2025

Published by: The Grind Magazine
Published on: April 4, 2025
By Saima Desai

Stuffy, crowded classrooms mean kids are breathing in viruses and pollution. Parents are trying to make the air safer, but hitting roadblocks.

In September 2023, Heather Pun started sending her son to school with a carbon dioxide monitor. He was spending his days in a stuffy portable classroom, and she worried that COVID was being passed lung-to-lung through the stale air.

The device, which reads the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air, showed CO2 levels as high as 3,500 parts per million (ppm) in his classroom.

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war on science

Top scientists pen letter calling for end to ‘assault on U.S. science’

Published April 1, 2025

Published by: CBC Radio
Published on: April 1, 2025
By Catherine Zhu

Nearly 2,000 doctors, researchers, and scientists have signed an open letter calling for an end to what they describe as the Trump administration’s “wholesale assault on U.S. science.”

The letter, written by 13 scientists from disciplines including medicine, climate science and economics, urges Americans to demand their Congress protect scientific funding and integrity.

The signatories, all members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, wrote that the Trump administration is “destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.”

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war on science

Rollout of ‘miracle’ HIV prevention drug is threatened by Trump cuts to global AIDS relief program

Published April 1, 2025

Published by: STAT
Published on: April 1, 2025
By Ed Silverman, Jason Mast

The Trump administration’s enormous cuts to a global AIDS relief program threaten to upend the planned rollout of a groundbreaking HIV prevention drug that was expected to save countless lives.

The medicine, lenacapavir, made by Gilead Sciences, has caused a stir because clinical trial data showed a single set of injections every six months could provide virtually complete protection against infection, a form of prevention known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or (PrEP). The drug, which is under regulatory review, has raised hopes that the deadly infectious disease can be mitigated around the globe. Early data for an even newer formulation suggest it might need to be given only once a year. “This is magical,” UNAIDS chief Winnie Byanyima declared last year.

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British Columbia

‘Abandoned and betrayed’: Removal of mask requirement in B.C. health care sparks outcry

Published April 1, 2025

Published by: Daily Hive
Published on: April 1, 2025
By Amir Ali

We’ve come a long way from the days of general mask mandates for the public, but a recent move to eliminate the requirement in B.C. health care settings is causing some outcry.

According to a recent BC Ministry of Health release, “People are still encouraged to wear medical masks in health care settings as appropriate,” but it is not mandatory.

Some groups, including Protect Our Province BC and DoNoHarm BC, are questioning the decision. This response comes after B.C. announced that it was launching the spring immunization campaign on April 8.

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Month: April 2025

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Future public health, economic burdens

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