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Canada not prepared for next pandemic: GHS Index – CTV News

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The Global Health Security (GHS) Index painted a grim picture in its 2021 report on the world’s preparedness for the next pandemic, with not a single country scoring in its top tier.

The GHS Index measures preparedness for health emergencies and issues, and is compiled by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Canada scored fourth out of 195 countries, behind the U.S., Australia and Finland, with an overall rank of 69.8 on the index score, up 2.2 points from 2019, the GHS Index shows.

Overall, the U.S. scored 75.9, Australia 71.1 and Finland 70.9. The GHS Index top tier is a score of 80.1 to 100.

The Index is broken down into several categories that are scored individually to mark preparedness: Prevent, Detect, Respond, Health, Norms, Risk and Overall.

Here is a brief breakdown on how Canada scored.

CATEGORY ONE: PREVENT

The worst area overall for preparedness in the GHS Index was preventing the emergence of new pathogens, such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the current pandemic.

“The global average for the prevention of the emergence or release of pathogens is 28.4 out of 100, making it the lowest-scoring category within the GHS Index,” the report said, adding that more than 100 countries “show little to no attention” to diseases transmitted from animals to humans.

Zoonotic disease was a category in which Canada took a dip in the GHS Index, down from its 2019 score and ranking the country 39th out of 195.

In its Country Score Justification Summary, the Index says of Canada; “there is insufficient evidence that Canada has national plans and strategy documents which include measures for risk identification and reduction for zoonotic disease spillover events from animals to humans. There are several plans on wildlife and animal surveillance related to zoonotic diseases that describe how Canada will address such risks, but there is no plan, guidance, or law mandating the risk assessments themselves.”

However, Canada went up four points in the “biosecurity” section of the Prevent category to 86.7, ranking Canada third out of 195 countries.

The Justification Summary, the document that gives context to each country’s score and rank in the GHS Index, states that “Canada has legislation and regulations related to biosecurity which address requirements such as physical containment, operation practices, failure reporting systems and cybersecurity of facilities in which especially dangerous pathogens and toxins are stored or processed.”

Canada ranked number one in the “biosafety” section with 100 points, the same as the 2019 assessment.

CATEGORY TWO: DETECT

Canada retained most of its scores in the “detect” category from 2019 in sections like “laboratory supply chains,” and “real time surveillance and reporting.”

Canada’s score in “case-based investigations” soared 37.5 points from 2019 to 50, ranking the country 15th out of 195.

In the Justification Summary, the GHS Index notes while “there is no evidence that Canada has a standalone national system in place to provide support at the sub-national level to conduct contact tracing,” there is evidence the Canada provides medical attention to enable infected people and their contacts to self-isolate or quarantine as recommended.

“Economic support varies by jurisdiction and employment sector, and the evidence seems to be Covid-19 specific,” the summary states, adding there is an agreement between the public health system and border control authorities, which added to the score given.

CATEGORY THREE: RESPOND

Canada experienced both highs and lows in this category, retaining its same score from 2019 in the category of “emergency preparedness and response planning,” and ranking 19th out of 195.

In the “exercising response plans,” Canada scored 25 points higher than in 2019, with the Justification Summary noting “Canada activated its national emergency response plan for an infectious disease outbreak in the past year. On January 15, 2020, Canada activated its 2017 Federal/Provincial/Territorial Public Health Response Plan for Biological Events in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, which became a global pandemic.”

However, the Summary also stated “there is insufficient public evidence that Canada has in the past year has undergone an exercise to identify a list of gaps and best practices through either an after action review (post emergency response) or a biological threat-focused IHR(International Health Regulation) exercise with the World Health Organization (WHO).”

Canada also scored higher in the “risk communication” and “access to communications infrastructure” sections, ranking number one and 61 respectively.

In the “trade and travel restrictions” Canada dropped 50 points from the 100 scored in 2019.

In the Justification Summary, the Index notes that “there is no public evidence” that Canada issued a restriction on the export or import of medical goods and non-medical goods (such as food or textiles) due to an infectious disease outbreak including in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Justification Summary also took aim at Canada’s travel ban, in answer to the question “In the past year, has the country implemented a ban, without international/bilateral support, on travellers arriving from a specific country or countries due to an infectious disease outbreak?”

The Summary states that “In March 2020, Canada issued a blanket ban on all foreign nationals from non-essential travel to Canada.”

Canada’s recent travel ban on countries in southern Africa in light of the emergence of the Omicron variant has been decried by organizations like the WHO.

CATEGORY FOUR: HEALTH

Again Canada retained most of its scores from 2019, with two notable exceptions.

In “health capacity in clinics, hospitals and community care centres,” Canada surged 16.4 points to 49.6, ranking the country 35th out of 195.

The Justification Summary says Canada has 261 doctors, and 994 nurses and midwives per 100,000 people, but “there is no public evidence that Canada has a national health sector workforce strategy in place (which has been updated in the past five years) to identify fields where there is an insufficient workforce and strategies to address these shortcomings.”

Canada dipped slightly in the “healthcare access” category, ranking the country 155th out of 195.

CATEGORY FIVE: NORMS

All scores in this section, which includes things like “commitment to sharing of genetic and biological data and specimens,” remained the same from 2019 for Canada, except for “Joint External Evaluation (JEE)” and “Performance of Veterinary Services Pathway (PVS).”

In those two categories, Canada went up 25 points to 50, ranking the country seventh out of 195.

CATEGORY SIX: RISK

Canada experienced some slight changes to its scores in this category, dipping slightly in the “political and security risk” section to rank ninth out of 195.

The Justification Summary ranked Canada among the “best” on things like policy formation, quality of bureaucracy, and excessive bureaucracy (red tape), human rights risk, orderly transfers of power and risk of disruptive social unrest.

However the country scored lower in categories such as vested interests, cronyism, accountability of public officials, organized crime and international disputes.

The Justification Summary stated that Canada was scored 77 out of 100 (where 100 is the best) measured by the Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International.

The country’s scores went up slightly in the “socio-economic resilience” and “environmental risks” section to 95.5, and 64.8 – ranking the country eighth and 38th respectively in those sections.

Public health vulnerabilities also dipped slightly to 77.7, pushing Canada to rank 18th out of 195. 


With files from the Canadian Press

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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

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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.

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