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Vaccination rates among children in Maritimes are too low to stop spread of measles

FREDERICTON – At least three out of the four Atlantic provinces have released data revealing their measles vaccination rates in children are below the 95 per cent threshold recommended by scientists to prevent the disease from spreading.

In Nova Scotia, the provincial government told The Canadian Press that about 23 per cent of children were not fully vaccinated for measles in 2024. Brooke Armstrong, Health Department spokeswoman, said 93.4 per cent of two-year-olds had at least one dose of vaccine and 78.6 per cent of two-year-olds had both required shots.

Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick say about 10 per cent of children are not fully vaccinated for the disease. Autumn Tremere from Prince Edward Island’s Health Department said between 91 per cent and 94 per cent of children in Grade 1 had received two doses.

New Brunswick Health Department spokeswoman Tara Chislett said the 2023-24 school immunization report showed 91.2 per cent of students with proof of immunization were up to date for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

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Chagas disease–carrying kissing bugs establish new base in Florida homes

Kissing bugs that carry the parasite for Chagas disease, a potentially serious tropical condition, have established a base in Florida, researchers say.

Chagas disease, which is rare in the United States, can cause a brief illness or remain latent for years before causing symptoms. If untreated, it can become a chronic condition that damages the heart, brain, and other organs.

Scientists from the University of Florida (UF) and Texas A&M University collected more than 300 kissing bugs, or triatomines, from 23 Florida counties—one third of them from people’s homes—from 2013 to 2023. The team analyzed the bugs’ stomach contents to determine the source of their last meal and whether it contained the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite implicated in Chagas disease.

Their findings were published this week in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

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Inside the Collapse of the F.D.A.

The reckoning that Robert Califf spent years warning about began, as so many things seem to these days, on social media. It was October 2024. His tenure as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration was winding down, and he was starting to imagine a happy retirement surrounded by grandchildren when he noticed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. taking aim at his agency, and the 19,000 or so people who worked there, on X.

“FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” Kennedy wrote. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you. 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”

It was a confused, almost comically pompous declaration, Califf recalls thinking, and it ought to have been the least of his concerns. Kennedy had not yet been tapped to serve as anything, let alone the highest health official in the land. Still, it struck a nerve. More and more, people seemed to clamor for things that were unproven, to question things that were and to express not only mistrust but outright hostility toward the doctors, scientists and civil servants trying to separate one from the other. That hostility was being nourished by exactly the kind of mis- and disinformation Kennedy was espousing. It was easy to paint the F.D.A. as a supervillain (an aggressive suppressor of sunlight, vitamins and exercise, to borrow Kennedy’s language), in part because the truth was so much more complex.

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Experts call new Canadian Long COVID guidelines “contradictory” and “deeply concerning”

Key points you should know:

  • The McMaster GRADE Centre and Cochrane Canada developed more than 100 recommendations for Long COVID. However, experts say some of these guidelines could harm people with Long COVID.
  • Some recommend controversial and scientifically unsupported therapies for the disease: exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy. These treatments mirror harmful and debunked recommendations for myalgic encephalomyelitis. They also contradict major guidelines.
  • The majority of pediatric guideline developers came from the same children’s hospital that parents say has psychologized their children’s symptoms. And one committee member has an inconsistently disclosed conflict of interest.
  • Professor emeritus Paul Garner attempted to influence the advisory committee, according to emails obtained through a public information access request.
  • The organizations provided only one week for public comments on the recommendations. Many people with Long COVID stopped responding because they felt their voices were not being heard.
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Medical Societies Sue Kennedy and H.H.S. Over Vaccine Advice

Six leading medical organizations filed a lawsuit on Monday against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and the federal Department of Health and Human Services, charging that recent decisions limiting access to vaccines were unscientific and harmful to the public.

The suit, filed in federal court in western Massachusetts, seeks to restore Covid vaccines to the list of recommended immunizations for healthy children and pregnant women.

Mr. Kennedy has been on a “decades-long mission” to undermine vaccines and to portray them as more dangerous than the illnesses they are designed to prevent, said Richard H. Hughes IV, a lawyer who teaches vaccine law at George Washington University and is leading the effort.

“The secretary’s intentions are clear,” Mr. Hughes said: “He aims to destroy vaccines.”

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Measles cases surge to record high since disease was declared eliminated in the US

Falling childhood vaccine coverage and a large, smoldering outbreak that was kindled in an undervaccinated pocket of West Texas have driven the United States to a troubling new milestone: There have been more measles cases in the US this year than any other since the disease was declared eliminated a quarter-century ago.

There have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles reported in the US in 2025, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Outbreak Response Innovation. Just halfway through the year, the case tally has already surpassed the last record from 2019, when there were a total of 1,274 cases.

Experts say this year’s cases are likely to be severely undercounted because many are going unreported. Three people have died from measles this year – two children in Texas and one adult in New Mexico, all of whom were unvaccinated – matching the total number of US measles deaths from the previous two and a half decades.

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There’s a tick population boom happening in Eastern Ontario

Eastern Ontario is at the epicentre of a tick population boom, and with it, health officials are reporting the highest levels of Lyme disease in the province.

So far this year, there have been 186 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in south-east and Eastern Ontario, stretching from about Prince Edward County to the Quebec border, including Ottawa, according to Public Health Ontario. That is more than half of all the cases in the province since the beginning of 2025.

By far, the highest concentration of the tick-spread disease in the province is within the large South East Health Unit, which includes Smiths Falls, Brockville, Kingston, Belleville and Prince Edward County, among other regions. With 132 cases, it has the highest rate of Lyme disease in Ontario.

Ottawa, with 41 cases, and the Eastern Ontario Health Unit, with 13 cases, also have higher-than-average rates of Lyme disease. Those reported cases reflect the climate-driven growth of tick populations across the area and heightened risk of Lyme disease and anaplasmosis, which are both spread by blacklegged ticks carrying bacteria.

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Adults who survived childhood cancer are at increased risk of severe COVID-19, says new study

People who have survived cancer as children are at higher risk of developing severe COVID-19, even decades after their diagnosis. This is shown by a new study from Karolinska Institutet published in the journal The Lancet Regional Health—Europe.

Thanks to medical advances, more and more children are surviving cancer. However, even long after treatment has ended, health risks may remain. In a new registry study, researchers investigated how adult childhood cancer survivors in Sweden and Denmark were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study included over 13,000 people who had been diagnosed with cancer before the age of 20 and who were at least 20 years old when the pandemic began. They were compared with both siblings and randomly selected individuals from the population of the same gender and year of birth.

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Fewer new measles cases in Ontario, public health data shows

TORONTO – A Public Health Ontario report released Thursday suggests a continuing downward trend in new measles cases.

The health agency reported 12 new cases in the province, down from 33 additions last week and 96 the week before that.

Two more people were infected with the highly contagious disease in a northern region that includes Sault Ste. Marie and surrounding areas. That region had been showing the biggest increase in cases for a few weeks.

Meanwhile, four more people were infected in southwestern Ontario — the area that was hardest hit for months.

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Public health and Icarus: what history [t]eaches about hubris and mistakes

Icarus had a problem: Desperate to escape from prison, he made wings out of feathers and wax. His father warned him not to fly too close to the sun, but Icarus couldn’t resist the freedom of soaring. His wings melted and he plunged to his death.

Like Icarus, public health is given advanced warning, but struggles between freedom and rules. And as in Greek myths, each failure offers a “moral.”

Here are five examples:

Referring to the pandemic in the past tense

COVID-19 is still spreading in unpredictable waves. Although hospitalizations are currently low, the virus landed over 1,000 Ontarians in hospital and killed nearly 500. New variants keep emerging, including the latest NB. 1.8.1, also known as “Nimbus.” It took just three months to become Canada’s dominant variant. Each time a new variant takes over, it threatens built-up immunity from vaccines and previous infections. Although Nimbus isn’t deadlier than previous variants, there’s no guarantee that future variants won’t cause more severe disease.

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Destroying 50 years of women’s health samples is like ‘burning the Library of Congress’

For decades, researchers have been collecting samples from hundreds of thousands of women and tracking their health. The work has deepened our basic understanding of human health, but now the entire project is in danger.

When nurses Patricia Chubb, 70, and her mother, Charlotte Mae Rohrbaugh, 98, joined the fledgling Harvard University-led Nurses’ Health Study in 1976, they had no idea it would last for nearly 50 years.

“It’s probably the longest, if not one of the longest, prospective health care studies for women that’s ever been done,” said Chubb, who lives in Pennsylvania. “They picked nurses to do the study because they know how to answer health questions correctly and can draw their own blood and the like — it’s very cost-effective.”

Study data gathered through the years from some 280,000 nurses in the United States has contributed enormously to improving how we live. The work has informed dietary recommendations, including national dietary guidelines led to hormonal therapies for breast cancer prevention and treatment; and contributed to research about how nutrients, inflammatory markers and heavy metals influence disease development.

Yet all of that priceless data may soon be discarded due to President Donald Trump’s ongoing feud with Harvard over what Trump claims is a failure to protect Jewish students during campus protests.

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How does Alberta’s new COVID-19 vaccine policy compare to other provinces? We asked

Alberta’s decision to reduce access to publicly funded COVID-19 vaccines so far appears to set the province on a different course than many other Canadian jurisdictions.

Most Albertans will no longer be eligible for a free COVID-19 shot this fall.

The provincial government recently announced plans to limit coverage to specific high-risk groups, including Albertans living in care homes and group settings, those receiving home care, people on social programs such as AISH, and immunocompromised individuals.

All other seniors, pregnant Albertans and health care workers are not included, despite strong recommendations by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) that they should be vaccinated. NACI also recommends that everyone else may receive an annual dose.

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We will not stay silent on vaccines, say leaders of five major U.S. medical associations

The 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.

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B.C.’s premier says measles spikes across Canada a result [of] anti-vax ‘recklessness’

VANCOUVER – British Columbia Premier David Eby says the growing spread of measles across Canada is “the sadly predictable outcome” of the “recklessness” of anti-vaccination politicians.

Eby says the disease is “no joke,” given the potentially serious impact on those infected, and it’s preventable with two vaccine shots.

He told a Vancouver news conference that the focus for provincial public health authorities now is to make sure that people who are not protected receive full vaccination.

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Childhood vaccines were a global success story. Misinformation and other obstacles are slowing that progress, a study shows

Routine 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.

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Check this list to see if you were exposed to measles in B.C. this month

The B.C. Centre for Disease Control has released detailed reports of where people may have been exposed to measles in B.C.

B.C. CDC says there are 12 currently active cases of measles in B.C. and that 17 new cases were reported in Fraser Health, Interior Health and Northern Health regions since June 19. Forty-nine cases have been reported this year.

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Viewpoint: CDC’s upcoming vaccine advisory meeting set up to sow distrust in vaccines

This week’s meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is likely to mark its end—for now—as a vaccine advisory body.

Regardless of which party controlled the White House and who served as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), ACIP—a federal advisory committee of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—held meetings that included presentations of vetted, evidence-based data and used a structured framework for moving from scientific evidence to vaccine recommendations.

Based on what we have learned about the new committee members appointed by the secretary, the meeting agenda and presenters, however, the purpose of the meeting appears to be an opportunity to deemphasize vaccine benefits—many of which are largely invisible to the public and taken for granted—and emphasize the potential risks of vaccines.

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Measles ‘out of control,’ experts warn, as Alberta case counts surpass 1,000

Alberta’s measles outbreaks have now eclipsed the 1,000-case mark and infectious disease specialists are warning the virus is “impossible to contain,” given the current level of transmission.

The province reported another 24 cases on Friday, including 14 in the north zone, nine in the south and one in the Edmonton zone.

This brings the total confirmed cases since the outbreaks began in March to 1,020.

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