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Canada upgrades to silver, still seeks gold after Day 3 of Paralympics

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PARIS – Canada upgraded its medal colour at the Paralympics on Saturday, but is still searching for its first gold in Paris after Day 3.

Nicholas Bennett of Parksville, B.C., swam to silver in the men’s S14 200-metre freestyle before Tess Routliffe of Caledon, Ont., placed second in the women’s SM7 200-metre individual medley.

The double silver brings Canada’s medal haul to six after the country totalled four bronze medals through two days of full competition.

Routliffe won her second Paralympic medal, earning the same result eight years ago at Rio 2016. The 25-year-old missed the Tokyo Games with a broken back.

Despite returning to the podium, Routliffe wished she could’ve dug a little deeper.

“When we race, all I want is to be able to max out my potential, and I don’t think I fully maxed it out this time,” she said after touching the wall in two minutes 57.17 seconds. “That’s a little disappointing, but it’s how life works.

“I went out there and I raced, and I did the best I could tonight.”

Bennett won his first Paralympic medal. He finished in 1:53.6, but Britain’s William Ellard set a world record in 1:51.30.

“It’s a friendly rivalry between us,” Bennett said. “He’s a good friend and also just an amazing athlete to race against.”

Canada didn’t have the same success in track and field. Wheelchair racing veteran Brent Lakatos placed seventh in the men’s T54 5,000-metre final.

The 44-year-old from Dorval, Que., who owns 11 career medals at the Paralympics, was in second place late in the race before falling off the pace down the stretch.

‘’I’m extremely proud of the whole race,’’ Lakatos said. ‘’I didn’t make any mistakes and executed the plan perfectly. It was just a little bit at the end. Maybe it was the injury, maybe the race, I don’t know.

‘’All I know is that it was just so much fun to be part of that.’’

Elsewhere, Amanda Rummery of Sherwood Park, Alta., was fifth in the women’s T47 400 final and Guillaume Ouellet of Victoriaville, Que., ran to fifth in the men’s T13 5,000 race.

Track cyclist Mel Pemble fell just short of securing her first Paralympic medal with a fourth-place result in the women’s combined C1-3 500-metre time trial. The 24-year-old from Victoria, who competed in alpine skiing at the 2018 Paralympics, finished 0.3 seconds off the podium.

With a qualifying time of 38.512 seconds, Pemble set a C3 category record in the event. The previous world record of 39.093 seconds was set by Australia’s Aniek Van Den Aarssen in 2022.

“It’s pretty cool to come here and realize I’m at my second Games,” Pemble said. “It felt more real coming into these Games with medal potential.

“The world record is going to make that fourth place sting a little less in the end, but I think it’s going to take a little while for me to get over that … it would have been amazing to win a medal, it just wasn’t in the cards this year.”

Jacob Wasserman of Humboldt, Sask., didn’t qualify for the medal race in men’s PR1 single sculls rowing. The Humboldt bus crash survivor, making his Paralympic debut in Paris, was fourth in the repechage heat with a time of 11:28.31.

Arinn Young of St. Albert, Alta., scored 26 points to lead the Canadian women’s wheelchair basketball team to a 63-54 win over Great Britain. Cindy Ouellet of Rivière-du-Loup, Que., added 19 points as Canada improved to 1-1 with group play wrapping up Sunday against Spain.

“We really needed this win today to set us up for the rest of the pool games. I’m so proud of my team. That was a massive team win,” Young said.

“Yeah, I scored the most, but I relied on everyone on court — my whole bench. Everyone was my hype man, and that’s why we got that win today.”

On the men’s side, Great Britain got the best of Canada with an 88-58 victory. Britain’s Philip James Pratt scored 20 points, while Colin Higgins of Rothesay, N.B., led the 1-1 Canadians with 14. Canada next plays Germany on Monday.

In wheelchair rugby, Canada finished group play with a 1-2 record and fell out of medal contention after a 50-46 loss to Japan. Edmonton’s Zak Madell carried the Canadians with 27 tries in the losing effort. Yukinobu Ike’s 15 led Japan.

“It’s pretty miserable — just the way we kind of did it. We showed a lot of fight to come back, but that doesn’t matter if you don’t win. Yeah, it feels awful,” Canada’s Cody Caldwell said.

“We trained for four years to get to the medal round and hopefully win gold, or to compete for gold, and to not even give ourselves a chance, it’s probably one of the worst feelings.”

Canada’s top-ranked women’s sitting volleyball team dropped a four-set decision to Brazil, falling 25-20, 25-21, 23-25, 25-19. The Canadians are now 1-1 in the tournament and take on Rwanda on Monday with hopes of reaching the semifinals.

In wheelchair tennis, Rob Shaw of North Bay, Ont., earned a 6-2, 6-1, win over Ymanitu Silva of Brazil in the first round of the men’s quad singles tournament. He advanced to the quarterfinals.

Montreal boccia player Alison Levine was eliminated by top-ranked Leidy Chica Chica of Colombia in the BC4 quarterfinal. Levine took a 2-0 lead, but ultimately lost 3-2.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 31, 2024.



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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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