For the last two years, rushing their toddler to hospital has become the norm for Daniela Mora-Fisher and her husband.
“A cold would become a wheeze. A wheeze would become a crisis,” Mora-Fisher said.
Julian, now three years old, has been “struggling with respiratory distress since probably he was 18 months,” she said.
Mora-Fisher, a foreign-trained physician who now works as a researcher at a Toronto doctor’s office, suspects a combination of allergies and viruses might be triggering what could be asthma. Specialists at her local hospital have seen Julian in their asthma clinic, she said, but they’ve told her they need to wait until he’s old enough to do the breathing tests required to confirm it.
Mora-Fisher and her husband have tried everything they can to reduce potential allergens —including moving out of an old house to try to get away from mould and from busy bus traffic she thought might have been polluting the air.
Allergies in both children and adults have definitely been on the rise over the last several years, said Dr. Susan Waserman, division director of clinical immunology and allergy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
“We’ve been seeing this now for decades,” Waserman said. “It’s eczema. It’s allergic rhinitis. It’s asthma. It’s food allergy. It’s really everything.”
Much of the rise in allergies and asthma “can be directly linked to climate change,” said Dr. Melissa Lem, a family physician in Vancouver and president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE).
Research has shown that over the last few decades in North America, “the average pollen season has extended about three weeks and that now plants release about 20 per cent more pollen than they used to,” Lem said.
That’s consistent with data gathered by Aerobiology, a Canadian company that monitors airborne allergens such as pollen and mould spores.
“We are seeing a lot more pollen and higher concentrations of pollen overall in the air year over year,” said Aerobiology spokesperson Daniel Coates.
“Pollen reacts to warmer weather. The more warmer weather you have, the more pollen you’re generally going to have in the air. And so there seems to be a correlation between the amount of pollen that we see in the air and the warmer weather that we’re having due to climate change.”
Waserman said she’s seeing more allergies in younger children than ever before.
“We used to think that pollen allergy wouldn’t make an appearance ’till the age of five or so. I see a lot of environmental allergy a couple of years earlier than that now,” she said.
“It’s a higher number of people and (they’re) starting earlier.”
Pollen isn’t the only allergy worsened by climate change, Lem said.
”Flooding … can lead to more mould in people’s homes and more moisture and people who have allergies to moulds can experience more indoor allergies,” she said.
“We also know that the very thing that’s driving climate change also increases allergies,” Lem said.
Burning fossil fuels releases more inhalable particles into the air. In addition to directly irritating people’s respiratory systems, the pollutants may trigger the release of immunoglobulin E, which is associated with allergic responses in the body, she said.
Climate change is directly linked to an increasing number of wildfires in Canada, which also contributes to the problem, Lem said.
“In clinical practice myself as a family doctor, I’ve seen many more patients in the last few years just anecdotally saying ‘I’d never had allergies before and now I do’. And also I tend to see more flares in those respiratory symptoms during smoke season,” she said.
“All those different moving parts … are coming together to create this storm of allergies,” Lem said.
Cecilia Sierra-Heredia, a research associate studying environmental health and children’s allergies and asthma at Simon Fraser University, agreed.
“The hypothesis is that this is a double exposure that kids are growing up with,” she said.
“More pollen in the air, more particulate matter, more pollution that’s inflaming the airways and then kind of priming their respiratory tissues and their immune systems to develop allergies and asthma.”
Sierra-Heredia noted thata “genetic predisposition” may be another factor.
Daniela Mora-Fisher said she’s surprised to see how many other toddlers besides Julian are suffering from breathing issues.
”Almost every single parent I know has puffers with their kids,” she said.
She also thinks the air quality around her home has triggered allergic reactions among family members when they’ve visited from Ecuador.
“They have no allergies or anything” when they’re back home, Mora-Fisher said.
But every time they visit her in Toronto, “they cannot stop, like, having rashes and sneezing,” she said.
In addition to taking steps to reduce climate change overall, there are more immediate measures that people suffering from allergies and their health-care providers can take to provide some relief.
Air purifiers in the home can help allergy sufferers, said Sierra-Heredia. If pollen is the problem, people should consider changing their clothes when they come inside and even shower if they’ve spent a lot of time outside in a park.
Allergy medications have improved over the years, Waserman said — including allergy tablets that “are now able to desensitize you to trees, to grass, to ragweed.”
Many people dismiss allergies and “suffer in silence” when they don’t have to, she said.
“When you can’t sleep, when you can’t concentrate, when your kid’s exam performance is impacted … all of these things are important quality-of-life measures. So don’t ignore them.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 26, 2023.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
Some Ontario doctors have started offering a free shot that can protect babies from respiratory syncytial virus while Quebec will begin its immunization program next month.
The new shot called Nirsevimab gives babies antibodies that provide passive immunity to RSV, a major cause of serious lower respiratory tract infections for infants and seniors, which can cause bronchiolitis or pneumonia.
Ontario’s ministry of health says the shot is already available at some doctor’s offices in Ontario with the province’s remaining supply set to arrive by the end of the month.
Quebec will begin administering the shots on Nov. 4 to babies born in hospitals and delivery centers.
Parents in Quebec with babies under six months or those who are older but more vulnerable to infection can also book immunization appointments online.
The injection will be available in Nunavut and Yukon this fall and winter, though administration start dates have not yet been announced.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2024.
-With files from Nicole Ireland
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
ISLAMABAD (AP) — Polio cases are rising ahead of a new vaccination campaign in Pakistan, where violence targeting health workers and the police protecting them has hampered years of efforts toward making the country polio-free.
Since January, health officials have confirmed 39 new polio cases in Pakistan, compared to only six last year, said Anwarul Haq of the National Emergency Operation Center for Polio Eradication.
The new nationwide drive starts Oct. 28 with the aim to vaccinate at least 32 million children. “The whole purpose of these campaigns is to achieve the target of making Pakistan a polio-free state,” he said.
Pakistan regularly launches campaigns against polio despite attacks on the workers and police assigned to the inoculation drives. Militants falsely claim the vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.
Most of the new polio cases were reported in the southwestern Balochistan and southern Sindh province, following by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and eastern Punjab province.
The locations are worrying authorities since previous cases were from the restive northwest bordering Afghanistan, where the Taliban government in September suddenly stopped a door-to-door vaccination campaign.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are the two countries in which the spread of the potentially fatal, paralyzing disease has never been stopped. Authorities in Pakistan have said that the Taliban’s decision will have major repercussions beyond the Afghan border, as people from both sides frequently travel to each other’s country.
The World Health Organization has confirmed 18 polio cases in Afghanistan this year, all but two in the south of the country. That’s up from six cases in 2023. Afghanistan used a house-to-house vaccination strategy this June for the first time in five years, a tactic that helped to reach the majority of children targeted, according to WHO.
Health officials in Pakistan say they want the both sides to conduct anti-polio drives simultaneously.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of people with private health insurance would be able to pick up over-the-counter methods like condoms, the “morning after” pill and birth control pills for free under a new rule the White House proposed on Monday.
Right now, health insurers must cover the cost of prescribed contraception, including prescription birth control or even condoms that doctors have issued a prescription for. But the new rule would expand that coverage, allowing millions of people on private health insurance to pick up free condoms, birth control pills, or “morning after” pills from local storefronts without a prescription.
The proposal comes days before Election Day, as Vice President Kamala Harris affixes her presidential campaign to a promise of expanding women’s health care access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to undo nationwide abortion rights two years ago. Harris has sought to craft a distinct contrast from her Republican challenger, Donald Trump, who appointed some of the judges who issued that ruling.
“The proposed rule we announce today would expand access to birth control at no additional cost for millions of consumers,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “Bottom line: women should have control over their personal health care decisions. And issuers and providers have an obligation to comply with the law.”
The emergency contraceptives that people on private insurance would be able to access without costs include levonorgestrel, a pill that needs to be taken immediately after sex to prevent pregnancy and is more commonly known by the brand name “Plan B.”
Without a doctor’s prescription, women may pay as much as $50 for a pack of the pills. And women who delay buying the medication in order to get a doctor’s prescription could jeopardize the pill’s effectiveness, since it is most likely to prevent a pregnancy within 72 hours after sex.
If implemented, the new rule would also require insurers to fully bear the cost of the once-a-day Opill, a new over-the-counter birth control pill that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved last year. A one-month supply of the pills costs $20.
Federal mandates for private health insurance to cover contraceptive care were first introduced with the Affordable Care Act, which required plans to pick up the cost of FDA-approved birth control that had been prescribed by a doctor as a preventative service.
The proposed rule would not impact those on Medicaid, the insurance program for the poorest Americans. States are largely left to design their own rules around Medicaid coverage for contraception, and few cover over-the-counter methods like Plan B or condoms.
