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Month: July 2025

Topic: long COVIDView all posts for the topic: long COVID

Experts call new Canadian Long COVID guidelines “contradictory” and “deeply concerning”

Published July 8, 2025

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Published by: The Sick Times
Published on:
By Simon Spichak

Key points you should know:

  • The McMaster GRADE Centre and Cochrane Canada developed more than 100 recommendations for Long COVID. However, experts say some of these guidelines could harm people with Long COVID.
  • Some recommend controversial and scientifically unsupported therapies for the disease: exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy. These treatments mirror harmful and debunked recommendations for myalgic encephalomyelitis. They also contradict major guidelines.
  • The majority of pediatric guideline developers came from the same children’s hospital that parents say has psychologized their children’s symptoms. And one committee member has an inconsistently disclosed conflict of interest.
  • Professor emeritus Paul Garner attempted to influence the advisory committee, according to emails obtained through a public information access request.
  • The organizations provided only one week for public comments on the recommendations. Many people with Long COVID stopped responding because they felt their voices were not being heard.
Continue readingExperts call new Canadian Long COVID guidelines “contradictory” and “deeply concerning”
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Topic: vaccinesView all posts for the topic: vaccines

Medical Societies Sue Kennedy and H.H.S. Over Vaccine Advice

Published July 7, 2025

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Published by: The New York Times
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By Apoorva Mandavilli

Six leading medical organizations filed a lawsuit on Monday against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and the federal Department of Health and Human Services, charging that recent decisions limiting access to vaccines were unscientific and harmful to the public.

The suit, filed in federal court in western Massachusetts, seeks to restore Covid vaccines to the list of recommended immunizations for healthy children and pregnant women.

Mr. Kennedy has been on a “decades-long mission” to undermine vaccines and to portray them as more dangerous than the illnesses they are designed to prevent, said Richard H. Hughes IV, a lawyer who teaches vaccine law at George Washington University and is leading the effort.

“The secretary’s intentions are clear,” Mr. Hughes said: “He aims to destroy vaccines.”

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Topic: measlesView all posts for the topic: measles

Measles cases surge to record high since disease was declared eliminated in the US

Published July 6, 2025

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Published by: CNN
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By Deidre McPhillips

Falling childhood vaccine coverage and a large, smoldering outbreak that was kindled in an undervaccinated pocket of West Texas have driven the United States to a troubling new milestone: There have been more measles cases in the US this year than any other since the disease was declared eliminated a quarter-century ago.

There have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles reported in the US in 2025, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Outbreak Response Innovation. Just halfway through the year, the case tally has already surpassed the last record from 2019, when there were a total of 1,274 cases.

Experts say this year’s cases are likely to be severely undercounted because many are going unreported. Three people have died from measles this year – two children in Texas and one adult in New Mexico, all of whom were unvaccinated – matching the total number of US measles deaths from the previous two and a half decades.

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Topic: OntarioView all posts for the topic: Ontario

There’s a tick population boom happening in Eastern Ontario

Published July 5, 2025

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Published by: The Ottawa Citizen
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By Elizabeth Payne

Eastern Ontario is at the epicentre of a tick population boom, and with it, health officials are reporting the highest levels of Lyme disease in the province.

So far this year, there have been 186 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in south-east and Eastern Ontario, stretching from about Prince Edward County to the Quebec border, including Ottawa, according to Public Health Ontario. That is more than half of all the cases in the province since the beginning of 2025.

By far, the highest concentration of the tick-spread disease in the province is within the large South East Health Unit, which includes Smiths Falls, Brockville, Kingston, Belleville and Prince Edward County, among other regions. With 132 cases, it has the highest rate of Lyme disease in Ontario.

Ottawa, with 41 cases, and the Eastern Ontario Health Unit, with 13 cases, also have higher-than-average rates of Lyme disease. Those reported cases reflect the climate-driven growth of tick populations across the area and heightened risk of Lyme disease and anaplasmosis, which are both spread by blacklegged ticks carrying bacteria.

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Adults who survived childhood cancer are at increased risk of severe COVID-19, says new studyPhoto of a woman who is wearing a white coat and a white mask. She has long blond hair. Photo: Bruce Mars / Unsplash.
Topic: researchView all posts for the topic: research

Adults who survived childhood cancer are at increased risk of severe COVID-19, says new study

Published July 4, 2025

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Published by: Medical Xpress
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By Karolinska Institutet

People who have survived cancer as children are at higher risk of developing severe COVID-19, even decades after their diagnosis. This is shown by a new study from Karolinska Institutet published in the journal The Lancet Regional Health—Europe.

Thanks to medical advances, more and more children are surviving cancer. However, even long after treatment has ended, health risks may remain. In a new registry study, researchers investigated how adult childhood cancer survivors in Sweden and Denmark were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study included over 13,000 people who had been diagnosed with cancer before the age of 20 and who were at least 20 years old when the pandemic began. They were compared with both siblings and randomly selected individuals from the population of the same gender and year of birth.

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Topic: measlesView all posts for the topic: measles

Fewer new measles cases in Ontario, public health data shows

Published July 3, 2025

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Published by: The Canadian Press
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By Nicole Ireland

TORONTO – A Public Health Ontario report released Thursday suggests a continuing downward trend in new measles cases.

The health agency reported 12 new cases in the province, down from 33 additions last week and 96 the week before that.

Two more people were infected with the highly contagious disease in a northern region that includes Sault Ste. Marie and surrounding areas. That region had been showing the biggest increase in cases for a few weeks.

Meanwhile, four more people were infected in southwestern Ontario — the area that was hardest hit for months.

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Topic: pandemic responseView all posts for the topic: pandemic response

Public health and Icarus: what history [t]eaches about hubris and mistakes

Published July 2, 2025

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Published by: Toronto Star
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By Iris Gorfinkel

Icarus had a problem: Desperate to escape from prison, he made wings out of feathers and wax. His father warned him not to fly too close to the sun, but Icarus couldn’t resist the freedom of soaring. His wings melted and he plunged to his death.

Like Icarus, public health is given advanced warning, but struggles between freedom and rules. And as in Greek myths, each failure offers a “moral.”

Here are five examples:

Referring to the pandemic in the past tense

COVID-19 is still spreading in unpredictable waves. Although hospitalizations are currently low, the virus landed over 1,000 Ontarians in hospital and killed nearly 500. New variants keep emerging, including the latest NB. 1.8.1, also known as “Nimbus.” It took just three months to become Canada’s dominant variant. Each time a new variant takes over, it threatens built-up immunity from vaccines and previous infections. Although Nimbus isn’t deadlier than previous variants, there’s no guarantee that future variants won’t cause more severe disease.

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Topic: Trump regimeView all posts for the topic: Trump regime

Destroying 50 years of women’s health samples is like ‘burning the Library of Congress’

Published July 1, 2025

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Published by: CNN
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By Sandee LaMotte

For decades, researchers have been collecting samples from hundreds of thousands of women and tracking their health. The work has deepened our basic understanding of human health, but now the entire project is in danger.

When nurses Patricia Chubb, 70, and her mother, Charlotte Mae Rohrbaugh, 98, joined the fledgling Harvard University-led Nurses’ Health Study in 1976, they had no idea it would last for nearly 50 years.

“It’s probably the longest, if not one of the longest, prospective health care studies for women that’s ever been done,” said Chubb, who lives in Pennsylvania. “They picked nurses to do the study because they know how to answer health questions correctly and can draw their own blood and the like — it’s very cost-effective.”

Study data gathered through the years from some 280,000 nurses in the United States has contributed enormously to improving how we live. The work has informed dietary recommendations, including national dietary guidelines led to hormonal therapies for breast cancer prevention and treatment; and contributed to research about how nutrients, inflammatory markers and heavy metals influence disease development.

Yet all of that priceless data may soon be discarded due to President Donald Trump’s ongoing feud with Harvard over what Trump claims is a failure to protect Jewish students during campus protests.

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