Alberta Health Services (AHS) is closing down its long-COVID outpatient program that had been operating since 2021.
In a letter to patients dated Aug. 8, AHS says the program has concluded.
“Your health and well-being remain a priority, and we are committed to ensuring you receive support during the transition,” it reads.
“We understand that this change might be challenging for some and thank you for your understanding and co-operation during this transition period.”
Comments closedConfusion and frustration.
Those are the feelings that 56-year-old Calgary grandmother Barbara Pencala was left with after she learned on Wednesday via email that Alberta Health Services (AHS) is concluding its long COVID Inter-Professional Outpatient Program (IPOP).
The temporary initiative was set up in 2021 and was never meant to be permanent, but the news came as a surprise to hundreds of program patients, many of whom took to social media to express their concerns.
Comments closedCOVID-19 is surging in parts of North America and Europe, and even played a role in ending the presidential campaign of 81-year-old Joe Biden, who was infected for the third time last month.
Nevertheless, on Wednesday the Ontario government shut down its early warning system to detect COVID and other emerging diseases.
Doctors, citizens and researchers are calling the decision to kill the province’s wastewater disease surveillance program both wrong-headed and dangerous. Ending the program will make it harder to track and thwart viral outbreaks, they say, and thereby increase the burden on Ontario’s understaffed hospitals, which experienced more than 1,000 emergency room closures last year.
“Pandemics do not end because science has been muzzled,” Dr. Iris Gorfinkel, a well-known Toronto physician and clinical researcher, told the CBC.
In emails to politicians, more than 5,000 citizens have demanded restoration of the program, with little effect.
Comments closedAlbertans can expect a further COVID-19 bump, driven by yet another crop of new variants, experts are cautioning.
COVID cases, hospitalizations and positivity rates have been rising since April.
“Unlike other respiratory illnesses, we’re not really getting a summer reprieve,” said Sarah (Sally) Otto, a COVID-19 modeller and professor in the department of zoology at the University of British Columbia.
“We’re seeing this across Canada and globally, that there’s an uptick in cases. And that’s coming from these new variants [and the] evolution of this virus.”
The KP.2 and KP.3 variants, combined, now account for more than half of Alberta’s sequenced cases.
Comments closedThe federal government, which spent billions on COVID-19 rapid tests during the height of the pandemic, says it will stop supplying provinces and territories with those tests. Heidi Petracek explains the move, and the reaction from some provinces and doctors.
Comments closedComments closedThe issue is not that there is a difference of opinion here. It’s that there is a huge amount of science that shows that these vaccines save lives and they are overwhelmingly safe so to claim otherwise becomes a statement of misinformation.
Wildfires in western Canada will likely bring smoke into Ottawa and eastern Ontario starting on Monday and into Tuesday morning.
CTV’s Your Morning chief meteorologist Kelsey McEwen says smoke could travel as far as Quebec City by Tuesday morning with air quality advisories being issued in five provinces.
“You can see the Jetstream pulling that smoke down south of the border through the Dakotas and back up through the Great Lakes,” McEwen said.
“By tomorrow, this begins to slide toward the Ottawa-Gatineau area, tomorrow morning and out toward Quebec City.”
Comments closedJust as the last vestiges of winter gave way to a few days of warm weather, smoke has clouded Alberta’s skies, bringing with it a foreboding memory of summers past, as wildfires continue to burn in the northern parts of the province.
Environment and Climate Change Canada has issued 321 air quality alerts, spanning the province from High Level to Milk River. Alberta Wildfire is reporting 50 active wildfires as of 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, with two currently classified as out-of-control.
One, near Fort McMurray, tripled in size overnight to extend its reach to about 5,500 hectares. The other, burning in Grande Prairie County in northwestern Alberta, had grown to about 1,400 hectares as of 1 p.m. Sunday.
Comments closedEdmontonians saw a slight improvement in the smoky skies Sunday.
The air quality index in the city had dropped from a 10 – very high risk – to a high-risk 9 by Sunday afternoon.
According to Environment Canada, wildfire smoke is harmful even at low concentrations, and residents in affected areas were told to reduce or reschedule strenuous outdoor activities and watch for symptoms such as coughing and throat irritation.
Comments closedThe United Conservative Party’s board is urging Premier Danielle Smith to reform COVID vaccine policy because the directors are worried about the safety of mRNA vaccines for kids, the party president says.
“We have serious concerns about them for children,” Rob Smith, the UCP president, told CBC News in an interview Friday.
“I would say that the board of directors’ position is that if parents are going to get their children vaccinated, they need to be very, very sure that they know what they’re doing.”
Comments closedDoctors say COVID-19 cases are spreading rapidly in Alberta, putting strain on hospitals. Chelan Skulski has the details.
Comments closedAfter trending downward for several months, COVID-19 is on the upswing in Alberta once again.
The province’s respiratory virus dashboard shows a number of key indicators, including case counts, hospitalization numbers and positivity rates, are ticking up.
“Many jurisdictions in Canada have seen a slight bump in late April in the number of COVID cases, the positivity rate and also in their wastewater monitoring,” said Dr. Dan Gregson, an infectious diseases specialist in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary.
Comments closedNearly $574 million will be doled out to researchers across the country for projects aimed at ramping up Canada’s preparedness for future health emergencies, including the next pandemic, the federal government announced on Monday.
One of the 19 projects is a national network of existing emergency departments and primary-care clinics, called Prepared, that will screen for any new viruses or pathogens that start to appear in patients.
“As a public health specialist and as a practising physician, I would very much anticipate there being another respiratory pandemic in the future. The challenge is we don’t know when it will be or what it will be,” said Dr. Andrew Pinto, Prepared project lead and a family physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
Comments closedAlberta Health Services is warning the public that an individual with lab-confirmed measles has been in public settings in Edmonton while infectious.
In a Wednesday news release, officials sent out a list of locations and times of when the infected person was out in public and said residents who were at any of the locations during the specified dates and times may have been exposed to measles:
Comments closedA panel of Alberta appeals court judges has dismissed an appeal by parents of five immunocompromised Alberta kids.
Lawyers for the families, known only by initials, had argued the children’s Charter rights were violated in 2022 when the province stopped masking requirements and barred school boards from enforcing their own masking mandates.
Comments closedWhen Alberta Premier Danielle Smith mused in the midst of the debate over her government’s new funding turf war with Ottawa that “we could also establish our own research programs” to ensure ideological balance in academic research, many Albertans suspected they understood precisely what she had in mind.
They thought the United Conservative Party’s Bill 18 is about more than just keeping the Trudeau government from getting credit for helping Alberta municipalities, starved for cash by her government’s policies, and Alberta students and researchers who qualify for federal grants. The so-called Provincial Priorities Act, many also thought, was intended to ensure that what research gets done in Alberta reinforces the UCP’s ideological preferences for unbridled markets and climate change denialism and against vaccines and effective public health measures.
Comments closedAlberta Premier Danielle Smith says it’s a good idea to have a physician who accused the province of exaggerating COVID-19’s impact on hospitals now lead a review of pandemic-era health data.
Smith says Dr. Gary Davidson was selected to lead the data review because she wants to hear a range of viewpoints, including from those “shouted down in the public sphere.”
Bodies and minds are just as affected by climate change as sea ice and forests, says University of Alberta scientist Sherilee Harper.
“Climate change impacts everything we care about,” she said. “It’s not just an environmental issue.”
That’s why Harper, along with 30 or so colleagues from disciplines as wide-ranging as economics and epidemiology, have banded together into what she calls Canada’s first university hub to shift the view of climate change from an environmental problem to a threat to human health.
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