Comments closedChildren are particularly susceptible to harm from air pollutants … They’re much more vulnerable to the health effects of poor indoor air quality because their bodies, brains and respiratory systems are still developing.
About 2 million people in England and Scotland say they are experiencing long Covid, figures reveal, with many reporting their symptoms have lasted two years or longer.
The findings were released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and cover the period from November 2023 to March 2024, revealing of those who reported having long Covid, about 1.5 million people – about three-quarters– felt their day-to-day activities were affected, while 381,000 people – about a fifth – said their ability to undertake such activities had been “limited a lot”.
Comments closedFederal agencies with competing interests are slowing the country’s ability to track and control an outbreak of highly virulent bird flu that for the first time is infecting cows in the United States, according to government officials and health and industry experts.
The response has echoes of the early days of 2020, when the coronavirus began its deadly march around the world. Today, some officials and experts express frustration that more livestock herds aren’t being tested for avian flu, and that when tests and epidemiological studies are conducted, results aren’t shared fast enough or with enough detail. They fear that the delays could allow the pathogen to move unchecked — and potentially acquire the genetic machinery needed to spread swiftly among people. One dairy worker in Texas has already fallen ill amid the outbreak, the second U.S. case ever of this type of bird flu.
Officials and experts said the lack of clear and timely updates by some federal agencies responding to the outbreak recall similar communication missteps at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. They point, in particular, to a failure to provide more details publicly about how the H5N1 virus is spreading in cows and about the safety of the milk supply.
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 closedUSDA is now ordering all dairy cattle must be tested prior to moving the animals across state lines as a way to help stop the spread of HPAI H5N1 impacting dairy herds across the country. This comes after a lab at Ohio State University detected genetic material of the virus in 38% of retail milk samples they’ve tested, data that also suggests the current outbreak is being underreported.
In a new Federal Order announced on Tuesday, USDA says in an effort to protect the U.S. livestock industry from the threat posed by highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza, there are a number of actions being taken with federal partners to limit the spread.
Comments closedViral fragments of bird flu have been identified in samples of milk taken from grocery store shelves in the United States, a finding that does not necessarily suggest a threat to human health but indicates the avian flu virus is more widespread among dairy herds than previously thought, according to two public health officials and a public health expert who was briefed on the issue.
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.”
Testing conducted by the Food and Drug Administration on pasteurized commercially purchased milk has found genetic evidence of the H5N1 bird flu virus, the agency confirmed Tuesday. But the testing, done by polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, cannot distinguish between live virus or fragments of viruses that could have been killed by the pasteurization process.
The agency said it has been trying to see if it could grow virus from milk found to contain evidence of H5N1, which is the gold standard test to see if there is viable virus in a product. The lengthy statement the agency released does not explicitly say FDA laboratories were unable to find live virus in the milk samples, but it does state that its belief that commercial, pasteurized milk is safe to consume has not been altered by these findings.
Comments closedComments closedWhen SARS-CoV-2 enters our cells, it disrupts the process of making proteins, which are essential for our cells to work correctly. A particular SARS-CoV-2 protein called Nsp1 has a crucial role in this process. It stops ribosomes, the machinery that makes proteins, from doing their job effectively. The virus is like a clever saboteur inside our cells, making sure its own needs are met while disrupting our cells’ ability to defend themselves.
When the US Department of Agriculture announced late Sunday that it had publicly posted new data from its investigation into a bird flu outbreak in cattle, scientists eagerly searched a well-known platform used globally to share the genetic sequences of viruses.
The sequences weren’t there. As of Tuesday morning, they still aren’t.
Researchers looking to track the evolution and spread of H5N1 say the information that was posted — raw data on a US server — isn’t very useful and is anything but transparent. They also say the government’s release of information in the outbreak, which was confirmed in cattle almost a month ago, has been painfully slow.
Comments closedCOVID-19 has killed two more New Brunswickers, while a child under four and two youths aged five to 19 are among those hospitalized by the flu, Tuesday’s Respiratory Watch report shows.
“COVID-19 activity remains moderate; some indicators (number of cases, percent positivity, and number of deaths) remained stable during the current reporting period,” April 7 to April 13, the report says.
Influenza activity decreased slightly, it says.
The two people who died from COVID during the reporting week were both aged 65 or older.
Comments closedThis story is a collaboration between the Investigative Journalism Foundation and CBC Saskatchewan.
Newly obtained internal data shows the Saskatchewan government knew COVID-19 was spreading at an “exponential” rate in the fall of 2021, providing new insight into what officials knew before a devastating COVID-19 wave hit the province.
The Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF) and the CBC have obtained a six-page briefing presented to top officials at Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Health in September 2021, days before the provincial government publicly declined to re-introduce measures doctors said were urgently needed to stop the spread of the virus.
The presentation, dated Sept. 3, 2021, came before a wave of COVID-19 infections that killed hundreds and nearly overwhelmed the province’s health system.
The government would later have to airlift roughly a quarter of its most critically sick patients to Ontario because there were not enough doctors and medical staff to care for them in Saskatchewan.
Comments closedMichael Gordon Jackson, a Saskatchewan man accused of abducting his daughter to prevent her from getting a COVID-19 vaccine, has been found guilty for contravention of a custody order.
Following two weeks of proceedings, the jury’s verdict handed down Friday found Jackson, 55, withheld his then 7-year-old daughter from her mother in late 2021 to early 2022. Police eventually found the pair in Vernon, B.C.
While the motive was undisputed, Crown prosecutor Zoey Kim Zeggelaar said the results of Jackson’s actions were in direct contravention of the Order.
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