TORONTO – The Canadian military is set to help with COVID-19 vaccine distribution in northern Ontario, as officials investigate the death of a teenager who had the virus and worked at a long-term care home in the province’s southwest.
Federal Public Safety Minister Bill Blair tweeted Sunday that the Canadian Armed Forces will support vaccine efforts in 32 communities of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation. The move came after a request from the province for assistance in getting vaccine to First Nations communities, he wrote.
“ur government will always be there to support the fight against #COVID19,” he wrote on Twitter.
The Nishnawbe Aski Nation, whose territory comprises 49 remote communities in northwestern Ontario, did not immediately comment on the pending deployment.
Meanwhile, officials in Middlesex-London said Sunday that a male teen who worked in a long-term care facility in the region was among the three deaths reported on the area’s COVID-19 case site earlier in the weekend.
Dr. Alexander Summers, associate medical officer of health for the Middlesex-London Health Unit, said he couldn’t provide the exact age or any other details about the teen.
But he said the person was a staff member of the long-term care home who was recently diagnosed with COVID-19 and died earlier in the week.
“Through the course of our investigation, the potential exposures could be many, but certainly the long-term care home is a potential exposure for this individual,” Summers said in an interview.
Summers said to his knowledge, the teen was not hospitalized with COVID-19.
He is the youngest person to have died after contracting the virus in the county, Summers said, noting the majority of deaths they’ve seen among COVID-19 patients have been in an older demographic.
“It can have severe impacts on people of all ages and this story and this unfortunate and tragic situation as a reminder of that,” Summers said.
“Certainly, this is a very rare occurrence. It’s a rare event. And the investigation continues as to understanding what exactly might have happened. However, regardless, it’s a sad day.”
The Roberta Place Retirement Lodge long-term care home in Barrie, Ont., north of Toronto, also made headlines over the weekend after health officials said a U.K. variant of COVID-19 was behind a deadly outbreak there.
On Sunday, the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit said it had learned of an additional individual with the U.K. variant within the region.
The unit said that individual had close contact with a person who is also part of a COVID-19 outbreak at Bradford Valley Care Community, a long-term care home in Bradford West Gwillimbury, south of Barrie.
Officials are now investigating whether that outbreak is also due to the U.K. variant.
Ontario reported 2,417 new cases of COVID-19 and 50 more deaths related to the virus on Sunday.
The numbers were slightly up from Saturday’s 2,359 cases, though deaths declined by two from previous figures.
Health Minister Christine Elliott said there were 785 new cases in Toronto, 404 in Peel Region, 215 in York Region and 121 in Niagara.
Over 48,900 tests had been completed in Ontario over the past 24 hours.
The province reported that 4,427 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine were administered since the province’s last report, and 1,436 are hospitalized with the virus.
A total of 280,573 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Ontario so far.
Since the pandemic began, there have been 255,002 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ontario. Of those, 225,046 have recovered and 5,803 people have died.
On Monday, the province plans to issue the results of a weekend-long expansion of its “inspection blitz” of big-box stores to ensure they were following COVID-19 guidelines.
The workplace inspections, which started in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton areas last weekend, stretched out to Ottawa, Windsor, Niagara and Durham regions.
Preliminary figures from Saturday showed inspectors went into 310 big-box stores and issued 34 tickets and 53 orders, Labour Minister Monte McNaughton said Sunday.
Overall, inspectors found the stores were only at “64 per cent compliance, which the minister said wasn’t good enough.
“The three big issues that we’re finding this weekend: masking protocols aren’t being followed, in some cases; the physical distancing is still an issue in some stores; and this weekend we found that some of these big-box stores don’t have a safety plan that’s required of them to prevent COVID-19 from coming into the workplace,” McNaughton said in an interview.
“Every business should know at this point in the pandemic what’s expected of them.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 24, 2021.
Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version said there had been 102 deaths in Ontario over the past 24 hours. There were, in fact, 50 deaths.
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.
Patients who are older, don’t speak English, and don’t have a high school education are more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay in Canada, according to new research.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information measured preventableharmful events from 2023 to 2024, such as bed sores and medication errors,experienced by patients who received acute care in hospital.
The research published Thursday shows patients who don’t speak English or French are 30 per cent more likely to experience harm. Patients without a high school education are 20 per cent more likely to endure harm compared to those with higher education levels.
The report also found that patients 85 and older are five times more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay compared to those under 20.
“The goal of this report is to get folks thinking about equity as being a key dimension of the patient safety effort within a hospital,” says Dana Riley, an author of the report and a program lead on CIHI’s population health team.
When a health-care provider and a patient don’t speak the same language, that can result in the administration of a wrong test or procedure, research shows. Similarly, Riley says a lower level of education is associated with a lower level of health literacy, which can result in increased vulnerability to communication errors.
“It’s fairly costly to the patient and it’s costly to the system,” says Riley, noting the average hospital stay for a patient who experiences harm is four times more expensive than the cost of a hospital stay without a harmful event – $42,558 compared to $9,072.
“I think there are a variety of different reasons why we might start to think about patient safety, think about equity, as key interconnected dimensions of health-care quality,” says Riley.
The analysis doesn’t include data on racialized patients because Riley says pan-Canadian data was not available for their research. Data from Quebec and some mental health patients was also excluded due to differences in data collection.
Efforts to reduce patient injuries at one Ontario hospital network appears to have resulted in less harm. Patient falls at Mackenzie Health causing injury are down 40 per cent, pressure injuries have decreased 51 per cent, and central line-associated bloodstream infections, such as IV therapy, have been reduced 34 per cent.
The hospital created a “zero harm” plan in 2019 to reduce errors after a hospital survey revealed low safety scores. They integrated principles used in aviation and nuclear industries, which prioritize safety in complex high-risk environments.
“The premise is first driven by a cultural shift where people feel comfortable actually calling out these events,” says Mackenzie Health President and Chief Executive Officer Altaf Stationwala.
They introduced harm reduction training and daily meetings to discuss risks in the hospital. Mackenzie partnered with virtual interpreters that speak 240 languages and understand medical jargon. Geriatric care nurses serve the nearly 70 per cent of patients over the age of 75, and staff are encouraged to communicate as frequently as possible, and in plain language, says Stationwala.
“What we do in health care is we take control away from patients and families, and what we know is we need to empower patients and families and that ultimately results in better health care.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
CALGARY – Alberta’s health minister says a new agency responsible for primary health care should be up and running by next month.
Adriana LaGrange says Primary Care Alberta will work to improve Albertans’ access to primary care providers like family doctors or nurse practitioners, create new models of primary care and increase access to after-hours care through virtual means.
Her announcement comes as the provincial government continues to divide Alberta Health Services into four new agencies.
LaGrange says Alberta Health Services hasn’t been able to focus on primary health care, and has been missing system oversight.
The Alberta government’s dismantling of the health agency is expected to include two more organizations responsible for hospital care and continuing care.
Another new agency, Recovery Alberta, recently took over the mental health and addictions portfolio of Alberta Health Services.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 15, 2024.
