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Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Invalidation of a landmark study on COVID-19 published by a French doctor

“Concerns have been raised” relating to respect for “publication ethics” of the journal’s publisher, and “the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants, as well as concerns raised by three of the authors themselves regarding the article’s methodology and conclusions,” stated Elsevier, the publisher of the scientific journal International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, in a lengthy note justifying this rare retraction.

The article, signed by 18 authors, notably Philippe Gautret, then a professor at the Marseille IHU, and Didier Raoult, who directed this institute, intended to demonstrate the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, combined with an antibiotic – azithromycin – against COVID-19.

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COVID-19 linked to more heart complications than flu, RSV

A new study published in BMC Cardiovascular Disorders shows that pediatric and young adult COVID-19 patients are more at risk for cardiac complications than flu or RSV patients of the same age.

The study was based on hospitalized US patients from 2020 through 2021 tracked through the National Inpatient Sample. In total 212,655 respiratory virus admissions were recorded, including 85,055 from COVID-19, 103,185 from RSV, and 24,415 from influenza.

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New N.B. school air quality testing results are delayed. Here’s why

Annual school air quality test results haven’t been released on time because the former Higgs government ordered every school to be tested.

Usually the data, which measures carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in classrooms to indicate overall air quality, is released in the last few months of each year and focuses on several dozen schools without mechanical ventilation systems.

But this time, they’re all being tested.

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Trump nominees should ‘steer clear’ of undermining polio vaccine, McConnell says

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a child, says any of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees seeking Senate confirmation should “steer clear” of efforts to discredit the polio vaccine.

“Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous,” McConnell said in a statement Friday. “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”

The 82-year-old lawmaker’s statement appeared to be directed at Trump’s pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after a report that one of his advisers filed a petition to revoke approval for the polio vaccine in 2022. That vaccine is widely considered to have halted the disease in most parts of the world.

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Over 300 COVID outbreaks hit Alberta acute care facilities last year

The reality is that people are dying from COVID in our hospitals, and we really are doing very little to prevent them getting ill and getting infected. And we wouldn’t do the same for any other infectious disease.

— Dr. Joe Vipond, an emergency physician in Calgary and co-founder of the Canadian Covid Society
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Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine

The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.

That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.

Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.

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Guelph wastewater testing will continue for COVID-19 and more by university researchers

Wastewater in Guelph will continue to be monitored for COVID-19, influenza and other illnesses through a new partnership between researchers at the University of Guelph and Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health.

The researchers will get samples of wastewater three times a week, then will submit their findings to public health, which will in turn publish it to a public online dashboard.

Provincial funding for wastewater testing was cut on July 31 with the Ontario government citing a federal program that tests wastewater; however, none of the testing sites are in Waterloo region or Guelph.

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Featured

Advocates Urge BC to Reinstate Healthcare Mask Protections Amid Rising Risks

DoNoHarm BC, Protect Our Province BC and the Canadian Covid Society warn of infection risks in healthcare

December 10, 2024 (British Columbia, Canada) – Advocacy groups in BC are calling on policy-makers to immediately reinstate healthcare mask requirements. The call comes as BC faces severe risks from COVID-19, a rise in “walking pneumonia,” local measles warnings, and Canada’s first human case of H5N1 avian influenza – which health officials warn could potentially turn into another pandemic.

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We can, and must, do more to protect students in higher education from the risks of post-COVID condition

Canada’s postsecondary institutions have a responsibility to protect students and others on campus from the risks of post-COVID condition as a matter of campus safety.

Canada’s Chief Science Advisor, Mona Nemer, recently released the report, Dealing with the Fallout: Post-COVID Condition and its Continued Impacts on Individuals and Society.

Post-COVID condition (PCC), also known as “long COVID,” refers to the poorly understood and often serious health damage left by the SARS-CoV-2 virus after the acute illness appears to have passed.

Universities, colleges and schools have a duty to take reasonable precautions to protect students, staff and faculty from foreseeable harms. They must ensure the water on campus is safe to drink. They must install fire and carbon monoxide detectors and make evacuation plans. Many have adopted a smoke-free policy on campus as part of a commitment to an international charter on health promotion in universities and colleges. Yet there is little pandemic health promotion on Canadian campuses.

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New imaging shows virus invading the body and lingering for years, potentially explaining Long COVID

Next time you think of dismissing COVID as just another annoying common cold it may pay to visualise what you see so starkly in this paper, the virus moving freely around your body and finding a long-term home in all sorts of places where it can really cause trouble, including the brain and the heart.

This work further emphasises the need for individuals, and societies as a whole to take this infection more seriously and try and reduce the amount of transmission using the tools we currently have, most especially vaccination, clean indoor air approaches and well-fitted masks in crowded and poorly ventilated indoor settings.

— Professor Brendan Crabb, director and CEO of the Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health
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Hundreds may have been exposed to measles during November NATO conference in Montreal

Montreal Public Health says hundreds of people may have been exposed to measles during a recent NATO conference in the city.

The agency says one of the participants in the military alliance’s parliamentary assembly, which took place in Montreal last month, received a measles diagnosis after returning to their home country and would have been contagious while they were in the city.

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Why hasn’t the bird flu pandemic started?

If the world finds itself amid a flu pandemic in a few months, it won’t be a big surprise. Birds have been spreading a new clade of the H5N1 avian influenza virus, 2.3.4.4b, around the world since 2021. That virus spilled over to cattle in Texas about a year ago and spread to hundreds of farms across the United States since. There have been dozens of human infections in North America. And in some of those cases the virus has shown exactly the kinds of mutations known to make it better suited to infect human cells and replicate in them.

No clear human-to-human transmission of H5N1 has been documented yet, but “this feels the closest to an H5 pandemic that I’ve seen,” says Louise Moncla, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “If H5 is ever going to be a pandemic, it’s going to be now,” adds Seema Lakdawala, a flu researcher at Emory University.

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Single bird flu mutation could let it latch easily to human cells, study finds

Scientists from the Scripps Research Institute are reporting that it would take just a single mutation in the version of bird flu that has swept through U.S. dairy herds to produce a virus adept at latching on to human cells, a much simpler step than previously imagined.

To date, there have been no documented cases of one human passing avian influenza to another, the Scripps scientists wrote in their paper, which was published Thursday in the journal Science. The mutation they identified would allow the virus to attach to our cells by hitching itself to a protein on their surface, known as the receptor.

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Opinion: This holiday season, let’s spread kindness, not COVID

It can be surprisingly simple to protect our health and the health of others — by masking in public with high-quality masks (such as KN95 or N95), testing before gatherings, increasing ventilation, and staying home if sick.

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How Ag-Gag Laws Hurt Animals and Increase Pandemic Risks

 Content warning: This article contains depictions of animal suffering and inhumane treatment of animals.

A teen in British Columbia recently became critically ill after becoming infected with H5N1. H5N1 is a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu.

Outbreaks of avian influenza, or bird flu, in livestock and flocks on industrial-scale chicken and dairy farms — so-called factory farms — in the United States are raising alarm bells for public health across the world.

Mainstream commercial animal agriculture is conducted in an intensive way in often cramped and unhygienic environments. These conditions are ideal for new viruses to jump from animals to humans.

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Mistrustful adults could be more vulnerable to vaccine conspiracy theories and bad at spotting fake news, report finds

Because outrage is associated with increased engagement online, outrage evoking misinformation may be likely to spread farther in part because of the algorithmic amplification of engaging content.

This is important because algorithms may up-rank news articles associated with outrage, even if a user intended to express outrage toward the article for containing misinformation.

Our findings suggest that misinformation exploits outrage to spread and offers concrete evidence for policy-makers to consider when attempting to craft effective solutions.

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Almost a third of preteens, teens with long COVID still not recovered at 2 years, study shows

A new study from UK investigators shows that — while most COVID-19 patients ages 11 to 17 who reported long-COVID symptoms 3 months after the initial infection no longer experienced lingering symptoms at 2 years — 29% still did.

The findings, published in the journal Communications Medicine, come from the National Long COVID in Children and Young People cohort study, which followed up on thousands of young people after their COVID-19 diagnoses.

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UK orders H5 avian flu vaccine for pandemic preparedness

The UK Health Security Agency (HSA) today announced a contract with CSL Seqirus to buy more than 5 million doses of human H5 avian flu vaccine to prepare for a potential influenza pandemic.

In a statement, the HSA said the vaccine will be based on a current H5 strain and is part of a longer-term plans to ensure access to vaccines for a wider range of pathogens that have pandemic potential.

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