Manitoba has confirmed its first case of avian influenza in domestic birds for 2024 at a commercial poultry operation in Portage la Prairie.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said the viral infection was detected on Nov. 26. Similar cases have previously been detected in the province in 2022 and 2023.
CFIA has set a primary control zone in the area where the disease was detected.
Comments closed⚠️ Content warning: mention of deaths.
A Nova Scotia judge has certified a class action lawsuit against Northwood, a company that was described as at the epicentre of COVID-19 deaths in the province at the height of the pandemic in 2020.
Some 53 people died in the Northwood complex in north-end Halifax.
A lawsuit was launched shortly after the deaths. On Thursday, Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Scott Norton certified it as a class action.
Comments closedComments closedTransparency is crucial to public health, but far too little effort has gone into informing the public about the long-term health hazards posed by repeated COVID-19 infections. That needs to change. A good place to start is by providing free rapid tests to enable Ontarians to gauge their risk and that of their loved ones. Its messaging would be clear: Results still matter.
The United States has a health-care system that is terrible and getting worse. It also has a health science system that is the best in the world and about to be dismantled.
The impending return of Donald Trump to the White House seems likely to collapse American health science, with consequences as disastrous for the rest of the world as for the approximately 340 million Americans in the U.S. Canada may be able to soften the impact here, but it will not be easy.
Comments closedA person in Louisiana has the first severe illness caused by bird flu in the U.S., health officials said Wednesday.
The patient had been in contact with sick and dead birds in backyard flocks, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said. Agency officials didn’t immediately detail the person’s symptoms.
Previous illnesses in the U.S. had been mild and the vast majority had been among farm workers exposed to sick poultry or dairy cows.
Comments closedOttawa Public Health is warning residents about a possible risk of exposure to hepatitis A at a local Tim Hortons in the city’s south end.
OPH says it is investigating a confirmed case of hepatitis A in an employee at the Tim Hortons at 372 Hunt Club Rd.
Comments closedAnnual 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.
Comments closedComments closedThe 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.
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.
Comments closedDecember 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.
Comments closedCanada’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.
Comments closedMontreal 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 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 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 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 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 closed
