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Still COVIDing Canada Posts

B.C. teen with avian flu discharged after weeks in hospital

BC Children’s Hospital says a 13-year-old girl with avian flu was discharged Tuesday after weeks in hospital.

The patient was taken to a pediatric intensive care unit with respiratory failure and pneumonia on Nov. 8 and health officials said she tested positive for H5N1 a day later.

A recent medical journal chronicled the teen’s hospitalization in Vancouver, which involved tracheal intubation and supplemental oxygen.

Her family says in a statement that the experience has been “life-changing” and that they are grateful to have their daughter home.

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COVID isn’t just ‘a bad flu,’ and NBers need to know that: Coon

Green leader cites huge difference in death toll between viruses

“(COVID) isn’t just respiratory. We know that it affects other organs – not just the lungs, but the heart, the brain and other (organs). So there needs to be a much greater focus on prevention, and what does that look like based on what’s been learned about the circumstances and risk factors leading up to those deaths?”

“Related to that is there needs to be a greater effort at awareness and outreach to the general population on COVID – that this is not just the flu. And we know that science continues to progress here. It’s now well understood that the more (times) people get COVID, the greater their chance of long COVID.”

– David Coon, leader of the Green Party of New Brunswick, Canada
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Mask Rules Are Back in BC Hospitals

Masks are back for British Columbia’s health-care sector.

On Wednesday the province said it had reintroduced masking requirements for all health-care workers, volunteers, contractors, patients and visitors.

The masking requirements kicked off on Monday and will last for the duration of respiratory season, which usually ends once the weather improves in the spring.

Masks will be required “in areas where patients are actively receiving care, except when eating and/or drinking,” the Health Ministry said in a statement Wednesday.

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B.C. orders masks for hospitals, care facilities as flu, respiratory illness increase

VICTORIA – Medical masks are again required in British Columbia health-care facilities as provincial authorities say cases of respiratory illness are rising.

A statement from B.C.’s Health Ministry says workers, volunteers and visitors in facilities operated by provincial health authorities must wear masks in areas where patients are receiving care in order to prevent the spread of the flu, RSV and COVID-19.

The requirement spans hospitals, long-term care and assisted living facilities, outpatient clinics and ambulatory care settings, and it’s expected to remain in effect until the risk of illness decreases, likely in the spring.

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Masking required at all B.C. health-care facilities once again

Masks must again be worn in health-care facilities across B.C., according to the province’s Health Ministry.

In an email to CBC News, the Ministry of Health said the requirement came into effect on Jan. 6, and everyone in health-care facilities, including staff, patients, visitors and volunteers, must wear medical masks “in areas where patients are actively seeking care.”

The move is in response to what the ministry says is a rise in influenza and RSV infections in B.C. COVID-19, it said, is “stable but showing early signs of an increase.”

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First Bird Flu Death in U.S. Reported in Louisiana

A Louisiana patient who had been hospitalized with severe bird flu has died, the first such fatality in the United States, state health officials reported on Monday.

The patient was older than 65 and had underlying medical conditions, the officials said. The individual became infected with the bird flu virus, H5N1, after exposure to a backyard flock and wild birds.

There is no sign that the virus is spreading from person to person anywhere in the country, and Louisiana officials have not identified any other cases in the state. Pasteurized dairy products remain safe to consume.

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Locations exposed to measles in Montreal due to the appearance of a new case

Another case of measles has been detected in recent days by the Direction de la santé publique de Montréal, which is reminding hospital staff to apply the necessary measures to avoid transmission of this serious respiratory disease.

In a notice published on Sunday, the Direction régionale de santé publique revealed that “a Montréal adult was infected with measles following exposure to another unvaccinated adult with measles, in a location outside Montréal.”

Public Health states that these two cases are part of “the measles chain of transmission initiated by the case imported from a foreign country who attended the NATO Parliamentary Assembly at the Palais des congrès de Montréal in November.”

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7 southwestern Ontario poultry farms in quarantine after avian flu outbreak

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) says seven poultry farms in southwestern Ontario are under quarantine due to an avian flu outbreak.

These include four farms near Ingersoll, two in Strathroy and one in North Middlesex County. The first cases were detected on Dec. 14, 2024, and officials say the virus was transmitted to the area through migratory birds.

“The source is generally migratory birds, so it’s usually spread through direct contact with wild birds or indirectly through fecal matter or contaminated water, soil or feed,” said Grant Loney, incident commander for the Ontario Avian Influenza Response.

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In severe bird flu cases, the virus can mutate as it lingers in the body

A 13-year-old girl in British Columbia who was hospitalized with bird flu for several weeks late last year harbored a mutated version of the virus, according to a report published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The case was Canada’s first recorded human infection of avian influenza, which has infected at least 66 people in the United States since last March, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This includes the nation’s first severe case, in Louisiana in December.

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Modeling tool estimates COVID-19 testing saved 1.4 million lives

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how crucial testing is for disease preparedness and response, and new research from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and a team of collaborators underscores that principle.

Published in the Jan. 2 edition of The Lancet Public Health, the research included simulation and analysis that suggests public-private partnerships to develop, produce and distribute COVID-19 diagnostic tests saved an estimated 1.4 million lives and prevented about 7 million patient hospitalizations in the United States during the pandemic.

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COVID 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting

AWAJI, JAPAN—The COVID-19 pandemic, as best as we can tell, took more than 20 million lives, cost $16 trillion, kept 1.6 billion children out of school, and pushed some 130 million people into poverty. And it’s not over: Figures from October 2024 showed at least 1000 people died from COVID-19 each week, 75% of them in the United States, and that’s relying only on data from the 34 countries that still report deaths to the World Health Organization (WHO). Last month, at a 4-day meeting here on preventing future pandemics, WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove ticked off those figures with exasperation. “The world I live in right now, no one wants to talk about COVID-19,” she told the gathering. “Everyone is acting as though this pandemic didn’t really happen.”

Yet 5 years after a coronavirus dubbed SARS-CoV-2 first surfaced in Wuhan, China, scientists are still intensively trying to make sense of COVID-19. “We would each have to read over 240 papers every single day to actually keep up with all of the [COVID-19] literature that’s come out” in 2024, Cherilyn Sirois, an editor at Cell, noted.

Despite the flood of insights into the behavior of the virus and how to prevent it from causing harm, many at the meeting worried the world has turned a blind eye to the lessons learned from the pandemic. “I feel this massive gravitational pull to go back to what we were doing before,” Van Kerkhove said. “There’s no way we should be going back.”

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Masking Fear

COVID hasn’t forgotten us

Yes, I’m still wearing a mask. And yes, it takes some courage. Any time I post images of myself in a mask on my Facebook page, the insults and jeers come thick and fast, mocking me for wearing “a face diaper” or for being too stupid to know that COVID is “over.”

I’ve had strangers shout angry abuse at me as I walk through airports. But I think the most exasperating are the jokes and eyerolls from colleagues and family members, who seem to take my mask as a personal affront or insult. These friends and relations bug me—jokingly, but incessantly—to take it off, or tease me for what they perceive as my neurosis. I had one Senate colleague make fun of me for masking—only to tell me, in his next breath, that he was just getting over his fourth case of COVID.

— Senator Paula Simons
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B.C. teen no longer critical with avian flu, has been taken off oxygen

We’re learning more about the B.C. teenager who became the first critically ill pediatric patient with avian influenza in North America earlier this fall, including some details about her recovery.

The new information was published in a case summary as a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday, signed by multiple doctors from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, BC Children’s Hospital and Public Health Agency of Canada.

Prior to the publication of the letter, B.C.’s Ministry of Health had refused to provide updates on the teen’s status or their case “unless there is a need from a public health perspective to do so.”

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COVID-19 Turns Five Today. The Next Pandemic Is Lurking

Five years ago this morning on Dec. 31, 2019, I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and my laptop. I was a member of “Flublogia,” a group of journalists, health scientists and kibitzers like me who had been tracking reports of disease outbreaks for years. I started every morning by checking my friends’ sites and Twitter feeds.

News had been slow lately; an Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo was fading out. But this morning, several of my friends had picked up a report from Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection about a “cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei province.”

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Five years of the COVID-19 pandemic: An interview with Dr. Arijit Chakravarty

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Dr. Arijit Chakravarty on the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic and public health five years after the initial outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Wuhan, China. The interview was edited for clarity, with many of the scientific terms defined to provide readers insight into the issues at play. Numerous links to papers and studies have also been embedded into the text for those interested in reading further. This interview builds upon prior discussions we held with Dr. Chakravarty in 2022 and 2023.

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Milestone: COVID-19 five years ago

Five years ago on 31 December 2019, WHO’s Country Office in China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan, China. In the weeks, months and years that unfolded after that, COVID-19 came to shape our lives and our world.

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The pandemic’s untold fertility story

Long COVID is snuffing out some patients’ dreams of having children, sharpening the pain of loss, grief and medical neglect.

When Melanie Broadley and her husband started going out in 2019, like many couples their age they decided to put “starting a family” on the shelf for a few years so they could focus on their careers. A postdoctoral researcher who studies diabetes and psychology, Broadley was 28 and in good health — she had plenty of time, she reasoned. Then, in 2022, she caught SARS-CoV-2 and developed long COVID, blowing up her life as she knew it and, for now at least, her hopes of having a baby.

“I became totally disabled by long COVID,” says Broadley, 34, who lives at her parents’ house in Brisbane. On a good day she struggles with debilitating fatigue that worsens after any kind of physical or mental activity, an autonomic nervous system disorder called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which causes her heart rate to spike when she stands up, cognitive dysfunction that means she can’t read or write for more than 10 minutes at a time, and an immune disorder, called mast cell activation syndrome, that triggers allergic reactions. Even though she’s been doing everything she can to recover, she’s still too unwell to cope with a potential pregnancy.

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CDC says H5N1 bird flu sample shows mutations that may help the virus bind to cells in the upper airways of people

Genetic sequences of H5N1 bird flu viruses collected from a person in Louisiana who became severely ill show signs of development of several mutations thought to affect the virus’ ability to attach to cells in the upper airways of humans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.

One of the mutations was also seen in a virus sample taken from a teenager in British Columbia who was in critical condition in a Vancouver hospital for weeks after contracting H5N1.

The mutation seen in both viruses is believed to help H5N1 adapt to be able to bind to cell receptors found in the upper respiratory tracts of people. Bird flu viruses normally attach to a type of cell receptor that is rare in human upper airways, which is believed to be one of the reasons why H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people and does not spread from person-to-person when it does.

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