Health
Northern village of Beauval adapting to COVID-19 outbreak – News Talk 650 CKOM
People in Beauval are doing their best to keep spirits high after the Saskatchewan Health Authority declared a COVID-19 outbreak in the northern village on Friday.
Mayor Nick Daigneault said the stress of it all is starting to get to the 750 people that call Beauval home.
“Relatively, we’re doing OK,” Daigneault said. “We’re adapting. There’s still a bit of fear in the community.
“With the active cases now (people) are wondering, ‘What more can we do?’”
A release from the SHA on Friday wouldn’t elaborate on how many cases were in the community, but an earlier release announced a worker at the Beauval General Store tested positive on Tuesday.
According to Daigneault, seven people tested positive while another 25 people tested negative during a round of testing at the store.
Since the general store — a hub for groceries and essential items in the area — is located at the highway junction six kilometres south of the village, there’s no way for Daigneault to know if those people reside in Beauval or any of the surrounding communities.
Daigneault encourages anyone in the area who has been notified by the SHA of a positive test to reach out to him for any needs so no one feels even more isolated.
Guidelines and public health orders like distancing from one another or limiting interactions weren’t followed too closely until positive cases were reported closer to Beauval, according to Daigneault.
“A few weeks ago people weren’t taking it as seriously as it needed to be taken,” he said. “With the active cases increasing in other communities like La Loche, I think a lot more northerners are paying attention to this.”
“In one regard, I’m happy that they’re taking COVID-19 a lot more seriously than they did a couple days ago, but that puts a bit of stress on us now to make sure we’re following out emergency planning that we’ve had to put into place.”
Businesses in the village are closed and checkpoints to keep unnecessary outside visitors away have been deployed.
Even the Beauval Northern Store has closed its doors and moved to online or phone orders ahead of time only. The other convenience store in the village is operating by “counter service,” meaning customers can only get items by request and are not allowed to browse shelves or move throughout the store.
The positive test revealed on Tuesday led to the closure of the general store, which also created some issues in the area as some people travelled from hundreds of kilometres away to purchase fuel and groceries.
“There was a bit of a panic as to those who were used to (fueling) up there,” Daigneault said. “We just kind of had to adapt ourselves, too.”
Anyone needing supplies that were caught off guard by the general store’s closure were escorted by personnel at the checkpoints.
“We did definitely see a surge of customers at our two little confectioneries in the community. We weren’t prepared for it, that’s for sure. They come in and they wiped out all of our staple products like bread, milk and eggs.”
The dwindling grocery supply in town led Beauval to closely monitor the village’s lone fuel tank so emergency vehicles won’t run out.
That in turn puts the pressure on the general store — a building that includes a grocery store, a convenience store and a gas station — to reopen before there are serious shortages.
Inspection and cleaning are being done in conjunction with public health officials to return to business as soon and safely as possibly. Daigneault said the gas station and convenience side of the store will reopen first, hopefully sometime on Monday.
The SHA is asking anyone who travelled through Beauval from April 12 to April 27 to self-monitor for symptoms of COVID-19.
“We’ve amped up our precautions here just to keep people at ease, and for the most part, they’re all liking the precautions so that they know we’re doing our part to keep the community safe,” Daigneault said.
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Interior Health says it delivered nearly 800,000 immunization doses last year — a number almost equal to the region’s population.
The released figure of 784,980 comes during National Immunization Awareness Week, which runs April 22-30.
The health care organization, which serves a large area of around 820,000, says it’s using the occasion to boost vaccine rates even though there may be post-pandemic vaccine fatigue.
“This is a very important initiative because it ensures that communicable diseases stay away from a region,” said Dr. Silvina Mema of Interior Health.
However, not all those doses were for COVID; the tally includes childhood immunizations plus immunizations for adults.
But IHA said immunizations are down from the height of the pandemic, when COVID vaccines were rolled out, though it seems to be on par with previous pre-pandemic years.
Interior Health says it’d like to see the overall immunization rate rise.
“Certainly there are some folks who have decided a vaccine is not for them. And they have their reasons,” said Jonathan Spence, manager of communicable disease prevention and control at Interior Health.
“I think there’s a lot of people who are hesitant, but that’s just simply because they have questions.
“And that’s actually part of what we’re celebrating this week is those public health nurses, those pharmacists, who can answer questions and answer questions with really good information around immunization.”
Mima echoed that sentiment.
“We take immunization very seriously. It’s a science-based program that has saved countless lives across the world and eliminated diseases that were before a threat and now we don’t see them anymore,” she said.
“So immunization is very important.”
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that samples of pasteurized milk had tested positive for remnants of the bird flu virus that has infected dairy cows.
The agency stressed that the material is inactivated and that the findings “do not represent actual virus that may be a risk to consumers.” Officials added that they’re continuing to study the issue.
“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the FDA said in a statement.
The announcement comes nearly a month after an avian influenza virus that has sickened millions of wild and commercial birds in recent years was detected in dairy cows in at least eight states. The Agriculture Department says 33 herds have been affected to date.
FDA officials didn’t indicate how many samples they tested or where they were obtained. The agency has been evaluating milk during processing and from grocery stores, officials said. Results of additional tests are expected in “the next few days to weeks.”
The PCR lab test the FDA used would have detected viral genetic material even after live virus was killed by pasteurization, or heat treatment, said Lee-Ann Jaykus, an emeritus food microbiologist and virologist at North Carolina State University
“There is no evidence to date that this is infectious virus and the FDA is following up on that,” Jaykus said.
Officials with the FDA and the USDA had previously said milk from affected cattle did not enter the commercial supply. Milk from sick animals is supposed to be diverted and destroyed. Federal regulations require milk that enters interstate commerce to be pasteurized.
Because the detection of the bird flu virus known as Type A H5N1 in dairy cattle is new and the situation is evolving, no studies on the effects of pasteurization on the virus have been completed, FDA officials said. But past research shows that pasteurization is “very likely” to inactivate heat-sensitive viruses like H5N1, the agency added.
Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the International Dairy Foods Association, said that time and temperature regulations for pasteurization ensure that the commercial U.S. milk supply is safe. Remnants of the virus “have zero impact on human health,” he wrote in an email.
Scientists confirmed the H5N1 virus in dairy cows in March after weeks of reports that cows in Texas were suffering from a mysterious malady. The cows were lethargic and saw a dramatic reduction in milk production. Although the H5N1 virus is lethal to commercial poultry, most infected cattle seem to recover within two weeks, experts said.
To date, two people in U.S. have been infected with bird flu. A Texas dairy worker who was in close contact with an infected cow recently developed a mild eye infection and has recovered. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program caught it while killing infected birds at a Colorado poultry farm. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered.
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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.
Canada is about where it should be when it comes to childhood vaccines, but for adult vaccinations it’s a different story.
Dr. Vivien Brown of Immunize Canada says the overall population should have rates of between 80 and 90 per cent for most vaccines, but that is not the case.
She says most children are in that range but not for adult vaccines and ultimately the most at-risk populations are not being reached.
She says the population is under immunized for conditions such as pneumonia, shingles, tetanus, and pertussis.
Brown wants people to talk with their family physician or pharmacist to see if they are up-to-date on vaccines, and to get caught up because many are “killer diseases.”
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