Heather Hanwell’s 12-year-old daughter recently missed almost two weeks of school after being hit hard by a viral infection. She’s among many parents who are caring for sick kids this flu season, which so far has seen a surge of cases among school-age children.
But the experience was particularly frustrating for Dr. Hanwell, an epidemiologist who says that improving the air quality in schools would help reduce the spread of contagious respiratory illnesses.
Comments closedThe volunteer-led organization Ontario School Safety is renewing calls to the Ontario government to improve indoor air quality in schools.
The call comes as Ontario sees a rapid increase in cases of the flu, particularly impacting young children.
In April, 2021, the Government of Ontario announced it was investing over $130 million, in addition to funds from the Canadian government, to upgrade school infrastructure to protect children from COVID-19. The majority of this funding was earmarked for ventilation projects to improve indoor air quality.
Comments closedThree children have died from flu-related complications in the Ottawa area this month, as officials warn of a “rapid and significant rise” in influenza A cases.
In a statement released Monday morning, Ottawa Public Health said three children between the ages of five and nine have died from influenza A-related complications in the Ottawa and Eastern Ontario Health Unit regions during the first two weeks of December.
Comments closedAdvisers to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appear poised to make consequential changes to the childhood vaccination schedule, delaying a shot that is routinely administered to newborns and discussing big changes to when or how other childhood immunizations are given.
Decisions by the group are not legally binding, but they have profound implications for whether private insurance and government assistance programs are required to cover the vaccines.
Comments closedSome Alberta pediatricians say making childhood immunizations routinely available in pediatric hospitals could help improve slumping vaccination rates in the province.
But the Alberta government is closing the door on that idea, saying children’s hospitals are under significant pressure, and it’s taking other steps to improve access.
Dr. Sam Wong, president of the section of pediatrics with the Alberta Medical Association, said he and his colleagues have been advocating for this change for several years.
Comments closedChildren and young people faced long-lasting and higher risks of rare heart and inflammatory complications after COVID-19 infection, compared to before or without an infection, according to new research. Meanwhile COVID-19 vaccination was only linked to a short-term higher risk of myocarditis and pericarditis.
The study is the largest of its kind in this population, and is published today in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health. It was led by scientists at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, and University College London, with support from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Data Science Centre at Health Data Research UK.
Comments closedThe risk of long COVID was 36% lower in adolescents vaccinated within 6 months before their first infection than in their unvaccinated peers, suggests an analysis of US Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) trial data published late last week in Vaccine.
The study, led by Massachusetts General Hospital researchers, involved 724 adolescents aged 12 to 17 years who were vaccinated against COVID-19 within the previous 6 months and 507 unvaccinated youth matched on sex, symptom onset, and enrollment date.
Comments closedHundreds of London schools are set to receive new air quality filters in a £2.7m scheme designed to reduce pollution in classrooms and protect children’s health.
Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan said the rollout, covering more than 200 schools across the capital, could cut harmful particulate matter (PM2.5) inside classrooms by up to 68%.
Speaking at St Mary’s RC Primary School in Battersea, south-west London, one of the first schools to receive the filters, Sir Sadiq said they could have a “life-changing” impact on young people.
Comments closedChildren and teenagers are twice as likely to develop long Covid after a second coronavirus infection as after an initial infection, a large new study has found.
The study, of nearly a half-million people under 21, published Tuesday in Lancet Infectious Diseases, provides evidence that Covid reinfections can increase the risk of long-term health consequences and contradicts the idea that being infected a second time might lead to a milder outcome, medical experts said.
Dr. Laura Malone, director of the Pediatric Post-Covid-19 Rehabilitation Clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, who was not involved in the study, said the findings echo the experience of patients in her clinic.
Comments closedA US modeling study published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics estimates that vaccinating pregnant women against COVID-19 prevented 7,000 hospitalizations in infants and 3,000 in pregnant women from January 2024 to May 2025.
The Stanford University–led research team analyzed COVID-NET surveillance data on COVID-19 hospitalization rates in infants younger than 6 months and incidence data on pregnant women aged 18 to 49 years under a relative risk of 2.65. The aim was to estimate the health impact of vaccination during pregnancy, mainly during the second or third trimester.
Comments closedRelative to uninfected children, COVID-19 patients aged 8 to 17 years were at a 49% higher risk for new-onset depression or anxiety in 2021, rising to 59% in those with severe illness, according to a University of Utah study published this week in PLOS One.
The researchers mined the Utah All Payers Claims Database to explore the link between COVID-19 infection, illness severity, and risk of depression and anxiety among 154,565 school-aged youth who had private insurance or Medicaid coverage. The average participant age was 10.8 years in 2019, when the study period began, and 48% were girls.
Key contributors to mental illness among children include the pandemic’s direct impacts on daily life, such as school closures, isolation from peers, and disrupted family routines, the authors noted.
Comments closedBeginning this fall, all Ontarians 75 and older will be eligible for a free shot that protects against respiratory syncytial virus.
Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones is scheduled to announce the expansion of public coverage for RSV vaccines on Wednesday, according to a Ministry of Health release that The Globe and Mail obtained in advance.
Until now, the Ontario government only paid for the RSV vaccine for seniors who were 60 and older and considered high risk, such as transplant recipients, dialysis patients and nursing home residents.
Comments closedThe authors are the presidents of American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Let us introduce ourselves. We are the doctors you trust with your health and the health of your family across every stage of life, from the first checkups in infancy and childhood, to health care during pregnancy and adulthood, through management of chronic illness and aging. We are family physicians, pediatricians, internal medicine physicians, OB-GYNs, and infectious disease experts. Our commitment is not to politics, but to the absolute well-being of our patients and populations, and to providing them with best evidence-based health care.
We have an urgent, united message: Immunizations work, they are very effective and safe, and they save lives. Vaccines are among the most rigorously studied and effective tools in public health. Through widespread immunization, we have eradicated debilitating and fatal diseases that once caused serious illness, hospitalization, and death for millions of people.
But today, that legacy is at serious risk.
Comments closedRoutine vaccines have prevented the deaths of about 154 million children around the world over the past 50 years, a new study shows, but efforts have been slowing recently, allowing for the growth of some vaccine-preventable diseases. This backslide could lead to many more unnecessary illnesses and deaths without an increased effort to vaccinate children and counter misinformation.
The report, published Tuesday in the medical journal The Lancet, says that over the past five decades, the World Health Organization’s Expanded Programme on Immunization has vaccinated more than 4 billion children. This doubling of global coverage of vaccines has prevented countless cases of tuberculosis, measles, polio, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.
Comments closedOn May 27, the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics published a patient information page about Long COVID in children. It states “Long COVID is common, affecting up to 10 per cent to 20 per cent of children with a history of COVID-19. With almost six million U.S. children potentially affected, this is higher than the number of children with asthma, the most common chronic health problem in children.”
Two weeks later on June 13, Danielle Smith’s UCP, famously fans of the anti-science Trump government, highlighted horrifically unscientific new FDA guidance suggesting healthy children and pregnant women are not recommended for COVID vaccination, while announcing a new policy where most Albertans have to pay for immunization.
Beyond the obvious inequities and loss of access that payment for prophylaxis presents, the UCP introduced a new four-phase rollout plan whereby those under age 65 without qualifying conditions cannot be vaccinated until the final phase. This means kids will likely head back to schools months before they are eligible for vaccination, ensuring they are exposed to the latest COVID strains before becoming eligible for updated vaccination. It also leaves the UCP an opening to not buy pediatric vaccines at all and claim “low demand.”
Comments closedCanada is in the middle of the largest measles outbreak it has seen in generations, with 2,515 cases so far this year as of May 17, which is the most recent data reported by Health Canada as of Monday.
Despite the spread of the disease B.C. is not considering making measles immunization mandatory for attending school, as it is in Ontario and New Brunswick, the Health Ministry told The Tyee in an emailed statement.
“There is no requirement from the province for students to be vaccinated to attend school, or that students’ immunization records be provided as part of school registration,” the ministry said.
Instead its strategy is mostly a reactive one, where it will use data to respond to outbreaks and exposures. B.C. will also encourage people to get vaccinated and will open school-based immunization clinics in some areas with low vaccination rates.
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Kennedy’s unilateral decision to change the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule for Covid-19 vaccines demonstrates once again why he is completely unqualified to be the HHS secretary.
In Congressional testimony on May 14, Kennedy said, ‘I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.’ Yet two weeks later he is making arbitrary public health decisions, defying norms, and with no accountability.
Comments closed