Health
Experts cast doubt that spread of COVID-19 can be stopped
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While the World Health Organization has said the risk of COVID-19 spreading worldwide is now “very high”, officials have suggested that efforts to combat the coronavirus are still in the containment phase.
But some medical experts believe that the containment stage has long since passed, that the spread of the COVID-19 is inevitable, and that living with the coronavirus could become a reality. COVID-19 is the respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus.
“This will not be contained, this has not been contained,” said Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease physician at Toronto General Hospital.
Massive public health efforts have been helpful in slowing down the spread of the infection and reducing the pace and frequency of exported cases from China to the rest of the world, but containment has not worked, Bogoch said.
‘Will continue to spread’
“This is spreading throughout the world and it will continue to spread throughout the world,” he said.
On Friday, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference that the Geneva-based health agency has “increased our assessment of the risk of spread and the risk of impact of COVID-19 to very high at a global level.”
China has seen more than 80,000 confirmed cases and almost 3,000 deaths. Outside China, there have been more than 7,000 cases in 60 countries, with more than 100 deaths.
Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, explained public health authorities speak of containment and of mitigation strategies when dealing with disease. Containment, he said, includes the measures taken to break the chain of transmission of the coronavirus.
Mitigation is accepting that the virus cannot be prevented from spreading and from causing COVID-19, but health officials do what they can to mitigate its impact through treatment.
“What we’ve been saying clearly is that containing the virus and interrupting transmission gives us an opportunity to stop the virus,” Ryan said.
“To accept that mitigation is the only option is to accept that the virus cannot be stopped.”
But Bogoch said if WHO officials are defining containment as the possibility that the coronavirus will not spread beyond a certain border, that they can still prevent different countries in different regions from seeing this infection, “I don’t think that’s very realistic.”
“We’re seeing global transmission of this infection.”
WATCH | World Health Organization warns countries to be prepared for COVID-19
The different strategies that have been taken — closing borders, reducing travel, stopping travel, halting trade — all of that slowed down the progression of the infection, he said. The initiatives in China certainly bought the world several weeks to prepare for exported cases, the WHO found.
“It does not halt it and it will not halt it,” he said. “It might buy you a week. It might buy you a few weeks.”
Containment may have been possible had there been very early detection of the novel coronavirus and had China imposed massive control initiatives when the scale of the epidemic was much smaller, he said.
“Then and only then could this virus have been contained. And I would say some people would even argue with me on that front as well.”
The challenge, said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, is that coronavirus spreads efficiently from human to human, much differently than SARS or MERS.
Symptoms of SARS more severe
Unlike SARS, where the symptoms were much more severe, a large proportion of individuals that are infected with coronavirus aren’t sick enough to come to medical care, a significant factor in containing the virus.
“It’s not something that we can prevent from happening in the absence of a vaccine. It’s not containable in the way that those viruses were,” Adalja said. “So this will become endemic.”
And it’s going to be much more of a challenge to change the thinking, from a public policy standpoint, from containment to one of mitigation, he said.
“I think that could have been avoided if people would have realized in the beginning that because of this virus’s characteristics, that it wasn’t going to be something amenable to containment,” Adalja said.
Jason Kindrachuk, an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in emerging viruses at the University of Manitoba, said the most recent situation reports and trends suggest a picture where the coronavirus will continue to spread globally.
“We’re in a position of fighting essentially a multiple front war against this virus,” he said. “How do you now start to contain something that is moving rapidly and transmitting rapidly across a number of regions, especially when we’re dealing with a global population that is used to travelling and moving as well.”
Ian Mackay, a virologist and associate professor at the University of Queenland’s UQ Child Health Research Centre, said determining whether the virus has been contained may play out country by country.
“Somewhere like South Korea, for example, is still tracking hard, but they must be looking down the barrel of having to switch from trying to contain this to trying to mitigate the damage it can cause.”
“I guess every country is going to look at containment versus mitigation with their own circumstances and if they even have the ability to contain at all.”
So what does mitigation of the coronavirus and COVID-19 mean in the near future?
Some have suggested the virus will run its course throughout the world and burn itself out, while others believe that the novel coronavirus will integrate itself into the seasonal viruses that come around every winter, causing clusters of COVID-19.
“This is going to become like some of the other coronaviruses that we have. There are four of them that cause disease every year. This is likely to become the fifth coronavirus at that capacity,” Adalja said.
“This isn’t unprecedented. And the vast majority of cases are going to be mild,” he said. “This isn’t something that’s going to be cataclysmic.”
‘Don’t panic’
“But it is something that’s manageable if we prepare appropriately and don’t panic.”
However, Kindrachuk questioned how vulnerable populations will cope with yet another virus, if it becomes endemic.
“Every addition of a new pathogen or a new infectious disease increases the public health care toll in those [vulnerable] regions … and ultimately has a much larger global impact in terms of both public health, as well as economic tolls.
“If this thing does become endemic, how do we now actually reposition ourselves to be able to compensate for this virus being a part of our lives?” he said.
Source: – CBC.ca
Health
RCMP warn about benzodiazepine-laced fentanyl tied to overdose in Alberta – Edmonton Journal
Article content
Grande Prairie RCMP issued a warning Friday after it was revealed fentanyl linked to a deadly overdose was mixed with a chemical that doesn’t respond to naloxone treatment.
The drugs were initially seized on Feb. 28 after a fatal overdose, and this week, Health Canada reported back to Mounties that the fentanyl had been mixed with Bromazolam, which is a benzodiazepine.
Article content
Mounties say this is the first recorded instance of Bromazolam in Alberta. The drug has previously been linked to nine fatal overdoses in New Brunswick in 2022.
The pills seized in Alberta were oval-shaped and stamped with “20” and “SS,” though Mounties say it can come in other forms.
Naloxone treatment, given in many cases of opioid toxicity, is not effective in reversing the effects of Bromazalam, Mounties said, and therefore, any fentanyl mixed with the benzodiazepine “would see a reduced effectiveness of naloxone, requiring the use of additional doses and may still result in a fatality.”
From January to November of last year, there were 1,706 opioid-related deaths in Alberta, and 57 linked to benzodiazepine, up from 1,375 and 43, respectively, in 2022.
Mounties say officers responded to about 1,100 opioid-related calls for service, last year with a third of those proving fatal. RCMP officers also used naloxone 67 times while in the field, a jump of nearly a third over the previous year.
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Health
CFIA continues surveillance for HPAI in cattle, while sticking with original name for disease – RealAgriculture
The Canada Food Inspection Agency will continue to refer to highly pathogenic avian influenza in cattle as HPAI in cattle, and not refer to it as bovine influenza A virus (BIAV), as suggested by the American Association of Bovine Practitioners earlier this month.
Dr. Martin Appelt, senior director for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, in the interview below, says at this time Canada will stick with “HPAI in cattle” when referencing the disease that’s been confirmed in dairy cattle in multiple states in the U.S.
The CFIA’s naming policy is consistent with the agency’s U.S. counterparts’, as the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has also said it will continue referring to it as HPAI or H5N1.
Appelt explains how the CFIA is learning from the U.S. experience to-date, and how it is working with veterinarians across Canada to stay vigilant for signs of the disease in dairy and beef cattle.
As of April 19, there has not been a confirmed case of HPAI in cattle in Canada. Appelt says it’s too soon to say if an eventual positive case will significantly restrict animal movement, as is the case with positive poultry cases.
This is a major concern for the cattle industry, as beef cattle especially move north and south across the U.S. border by the thousands. Appelt says that CFIA will address an infection in each species differently in conjunction with how the disease is spread and the threat to neighbouring farms or livestock.
Currently, provincial dairy organizations have advised producers to postpone any non-essential tours of dairy barns, as a precaution, in addition to other biosecurity measures to reduce the risk of cattle contracting HPAI.
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Health
Toronto reports 2 more measles cases. Use our tool to check the spread in Canada – Toronto Star
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Canada has seen a concerning rise in measles cases in the first months of 2024.
By the third week of March, the country had already recorded more than three times the number of cases as all of last year. Canada had just 12 cases of measles in 2023, up from three in 2022.
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