adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

News

As Canada awaits vaccine doses, relying on other countries is the wrong approach: U.K. expert – CTV News

Published

 on


TORONTO —
Countries like Canada that are waiting for vaccine shipments amid an international shortage could have done more in the early days of the pandemic to boost their own domestic production capacity, according to a leading vaccine expert from the United Kingdom.

Oxford University Regius professor of medicine Sir John Bell was responsible for overseeing the development of the Astrazeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, which is approved in the U.K. but not yet in Canada. He said the U.K. went to great lengths to scale up its production in early 2020 as vaccine trials began.

“We started from nothing, and we’re now pretty pleased that we’re in pretty good shape. Lots of other countries decided that they would rely on others, and that perhaps has not proved to be the right strategy,” Bell told CTV’s Question Period in an exclusive interview with Evan Solomon airing Sunday.

Canada received zero new shipments of vaccines earlier this week due to a production delay from Pfizer, which is making adjustments to its factory in Belgium. At the same time, federal officials are in talks with Pfizer over whether a vial can supply five or six vaccines — a difference that has raised questions about whether Canada will lag behind its goal to vaccine 3 million Canadians by the end of March.

But the U.K. and the U.S. have not seen the same slowdown because they have a larger production capacity.

Bell, who is Canadian, said Canada should think of vaccines as a health security issue and suggested that Canada is “overly dependent” on the U.S.

“Although the current administration in the U.S., I think will be more sympathetic — the previous administration was not going to give you a leg up on any of this stuff. So you know you do have to be independent and autonomous in these health security issues,” he said.

The federal government has invested more than $126 million to build a new biomanufacturing facility in Montreal to help produce vaccine candidates for emergency use. The site remains under construction and is expected to be ready by July.

Another facility in Montreal is being upgraded to help produce vaccines, but it also remains under construction. The government says that, based on a “conservative approach,” the facility could produce 250,000 doses per month depending on the vaccine’s specifications.

The U.K. was able to increase its vaccine manufacturing capabilities from “very close to zero” in a matter of 10 months, Bell said. The strategy was to repurpose existing manufacturing facilities elsewhere in the country to suit vaccine production.

“They repurposed those, they transferred the technology to them, they learned how to scale up, they went through all the hard yards it takes to become a manufacturing facility,” he said.

Asked if Canada missed an opportunity in the early days of the pandemic, Bell said: “I’m not going to get into a discussion about whether you guys did the right thing or the wrong thing. The reality is you don’t have enough vaccine, you know you need to get on with it.”

One way to speed up vaccine distribution would be to approve more vaccines. Bell pointed to the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, which is still under review by Health Canada, as one possibility.

“That will increase your numbers pretty dramatically,” he said.

Health Canada revealed Friday that it is on track to approve the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine by mid-February and suggested that a fourth vaccine approval may not be far behind.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said Canada’s rollout strategy has been held up by the fact that the government did not go far enough in its efforts to produce vaccines in Canada.

“Last March, April when we saw countries hoarding PPE, medical supplies, planes not leaving tarmacs — did they think it was going to be better with the vaccine?” O’Toole told CTV’s Question Period.

The federal government’s main strategy has long been to procure a variety of vaccine candidates from multiple producers across the globe in the event that they were approved, thereby diversifying Canada’s stockpile. In total, Canada has secured more than 400 million vaccine doses from several companies, but so far only two — Moderna and Pfizer — have been approved.

As of Friday, just over 2 per cent of Canada’s population has received at least their first vaccine, according to tracking by CTVNews.ca.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

News

STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

Published

 on

 

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

___

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.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

Published

 on

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

___

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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

News

Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

Published

 on

 

Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending