Health

Arra to require masks within 10 days in Grey-Bruce – Owen Sound Sun Times

Published

4 years ago

July 7, 2020

People in Grey-Bruce will soon be required to wear masks in indoor settings where there is public interaction.

Dr. Ian Arra, the medical officer of health, said details remain to be finalized, including how enforcement would work. But there will be exemptions based on the honour system for people with conditions that prevent mask-wearing, he said.

“With reopening and less compliance, we might see more risk of transmission. And that’s why we pulled the trigger on this mandating to get that added benefit before things go to increased cases,” Arra said in an interview Tuesday afternoon.

He anticipates mask use will increase after the order. According to a news release to announce the mask order, expected to be made within 10 days, there is evidence doing so decreases the transmission of the disease through respiratory droplets.

Arra stressed masks are no silver bullet, just added protection to augment the same safety practices that have been successful at limiting transmission of the virus since mid-March, such as hand-washing and physical and social distancing.

The approach will be to empower businesses with an order to create a policy requiring masks among customers and employees, with the option of asking people to leave if they don’t comply, possibly utilizing trespass laws.

It would apply to a grocery store, for example, but not the back offices of the store.

Arra said in an interview he’s inclined to consider business exemptions in cases where businesses are already employing effective measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19, such as face shields and physical distancing, which might make mask-wearing redundant, he said.

He said he met electronically with mayors of all 17 Grey-Bruce municipalities Friday and received general agreement that an order should be issued, followed by municipal bylaws governing mask-wearing, which take longer.

He said he wants to consult more to help refine the order. If it were signed Friday, the order would provide time before people would have to comply, Arra said.

He said data and observations of public behaviour drove his decision now to require mask-wearing in places the public may gather indoors.

The epidemiological data and compliance with advice to wear a mask has remained steady, he said. But physical and social distancing compliance has fallen off.

“We have seen evidence of lower compliance with those things. And that’s expected. It’s difficult to sustain these interventions, social distancing and physical distancing for so long.”

Arra said the order is also being issued now for consistency with other jurisdictions that are also implementing mask-wearing requirements.

Before the order comes into effect, Arra said there must be ways to provide equity for all citizens, including the homeless who, without access to free masks, would be in violation of his order.

Bruce Power’s 150,000 mask donation should address that, he suggested.

* * *

A surge in requests for testing at one assessment centre from people claiming the health unit sent them concerns the medical officer of health.

Dr. Ian Arra issued a news release Tuesday featuring an example, the discovery of a case of COVID-19 on Friday, July 3 in West Grey. News of the case got around the community quickly and prompted some people to show up at an assessment centre falsely claiming the health unit told them to get tested, Arra said. Some also called the health unit or shared concerns on social media.

Arra said this was driven by anxiety. He said he issued the release to reassure the public that if they didn’t get a call from public health “it’s a good day.”

He said health unit staff effectively trace contacts of any COVID-19-infected people within 24 hours. “We asked a number of people, a handful of people, (who) needed to self-isolate, go get tested, observe for symptoms.”

Arra said it was quiet over the weekend but then Tuesday morning someone at an assessment centre said they saw 50 extra people compared to any other day, and many of them said we were sent by public health.

Arra called that “alarming, why somebody would claim that they were asked by public health to go if public health didn’t.” He didn’t know if all those who claimed public health sent them originated with the West Grey case.

He offered reassurance in the release: “If there was potential risk of transmission, full response and control is implemented. The lack of hospitalization and death shows the high success rate of our outbreak management.”

“Ontario provincial government made testing widely available to all. A person does not need to falsely claim direction from public health to access testing.”

The release said wrongly claiming the health unit sent you for testing could introduce bias in the lab data.

* * *

Just two active reported cases of COVID-19 remain in Grey-Bruce, the Grey Bruce Health Unit announced Tuesday.

There were no new cases reported in the 24 hours prior to 3:30 p.m.

In all, there have been 114 cases, 107 recovered and five cases referred to other health units. There have been zero deaths and currently no one is hospitalized for the virus. Twenty-eight health care workers working in Grey-Bruce caught the bug.

There are currently no long-term care or retirement home outbreaks of COVID-19.

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Health

Whooping cough is at a decade-high level in US

Published

20 hours ago

October 17, 2024

Anne Joseph

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.

There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.

The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.

Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.

Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.

“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.

But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.

That includes his own teenage daughter.

“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.

It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.

“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”

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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Health

Scientists show how sperm and egg come together like a key in a lock

Published

20 hours ago

October 17, 2024

Anne Joseph

How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.

New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.

“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.

The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.

Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.

It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.

Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.

Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.

The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.

The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Health

Turn Your Wife Into Your Personal Sex Kitten

Published

1 day ago

October 17, 2024

Sven Eggers

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