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.
Comments closedIf 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.
Comments closedScientists 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.
Comments closedComments closedIt 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.
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.
Comments closedA 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.
Comments closedThe 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.
Comments closedAn experimental study in mice shows that SARS-CoV-2 infection can damage the retinas, with long-term implications for vision. Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection include various neurocognitive symptoms, suggesting the virus can affect the central nervous system. The eyes are also part of the central nervous system, but little is known about the virus’s effects on these organs.
Comments closedCOVID-19 may be a risk factor for multiple sclerosis (MS). This has been shown by new research at Örebro University and Örebro University Hospital, Sweden. The study is published in the journal Brain Communications.
“We saw a raised risk of MS among people who had severe COVID-19. However, only an extremely small number of people who had severe COVID-19 received a subsequent MS diagnosis,” says Scott Montgomery, professor in clinical epidemiology.
Comments closedA Kingston family doctor is being ordered to repay more than $600,000 to the Ontario government for what the province says was reimbursement for improperly billed medical services related to mobile COVID-19 vaccination clinics.
Dr. Elaine Ma has been told by the Health Services Appeal and Review Board to repay $600,962.61, plus interest, to the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP), to reimburse money she billed the province for vaccinations administered during drive-in COVID-19 vaccination clinics between July 2021 and January 2022.
Comments closedThe National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading public funder of biomedical research, has an enviable track record. Research supported by the agency has led to more than 100 Nobel Prizes and has supported more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by federal regulators from 2010 to 2019.
No surprise, then, that the agency has been called “the crown jewel of the federal government.” But come January, when President-elect Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans take charge, the N.I.H. may face a reckoning.
Comments closedhe president of the Montreal Police Brotherhood, Yves Francoeur, declared Friday on TVA Nouvelles that he is mandating his lawyers to find legal ways to force demonstrators to reveal their faces, describing the situation as unacceptable.
“Yes, citizens have the right to demonstrate, but why would someone need to cover their face, if it is not to do bad things?”, declared Mr. Francoeur. Moreover, his public comments come a week to the day after a demonstration against NATO that degenerated downtown.
Comments closedPresident-elect Donald Trump’s choice this week to lead the National Institutes of Health is a controversial Stanford researcher who was highly critical of the COVID-19 pandemic response, drawing pushback from the medical community and some still suffering from the long-term effects of the disease.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, was one of three co-authors of a 2020 letter that challenged policies like lockdowns and mask mandates, and called for speeding up herd immunity.
Comments closedWhen COVID-19 first struck, Canada had a problem: It lacked domestic capacity to manufacture vaccines. Today, the government of Canada faces the opposite problem: It owns a factory that isn’t manufacturing vaccines.
The Biologics Manufacturing Centre (BMC) in Montreal was completed in 2021 at the cost of $126 million, and fully licensed by Health Canada in 2022. However, a 2021 deal with Novavax to produce their COVID-19 vaccine looks increasingly unlikely to produce a single dose. Indeed, despite annual operating costs around $17 million a year, the BMC has never produced anything.
Comments closedPerth emergency physician Dr. Alan Drummond has never seen anything like it. Drummond has treated five or six patients with pneumonia during almost every shift…
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