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Economic effects of COVID-19 on B.C. still uncertain: finance minister – CityNews Vancouver

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VICTORIA (NEWS 1130) – The long-term economic impacts over COVID-19 on B.C. are still up in the air, according to the province’s finance minister.

Carole James says it is still too early to quantify the effects, but she expects some kind of impact on the provincial economy.

“We’ll be discussing this issue with colleagues across the country, I expect as well,” James said. There is no question that it will have an impact on British Columbia. We’re a small, open economy and anything that buffets from the outside is going to have an impact on British Columbia.

James says there are contingencies in the budget to deal with outside issues like this that impact the province.

“Anything from the outside that’s going to have an impact on British Columbia’s economy is why we built in a forecast allowance, why we have contingencies, why we have the surplus, why we’ve predicted growth lower than the forecast council’s growth,” she said.

James says any impact to the economy may not be seen until the next fiscal year begins in a few weeks, but she does expect many economies to contract.

“I think there’s no question. You’re certainly hearing globally that growth is being downgraded in a number of places and, as B.C. is not an island, we’re not immune. It’s going to have an impact on us,” she said.

The U.S. Federal Reserve cut its key interest rate by half a percentage point Tuesday, while experts predict the Bank of Canada will cute rates this week to fend off unrest within the market.

B.C. recorded its ninth case of COVID-19 Tuesday. A man returning from Iran to the Fraser Health Region began to feel ill and is now in self-isolation.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday that despite the risk to Canadians remaining low, his government is working with the international community to keep people safe from the novel coronavirus.

Meanwhile some Canadian companies are telling their employees to stay at home for several days if they are returning from certain COVID-19 hotspot including China, South Korea, Iran, and Italy

Canada has at least 29 cases of the virus known as COVID-19.

With files from Liza Yuzda

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Whooping cough is at a decade-high level in US

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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

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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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