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Over 40% of Waterloo Region adults now fully vaccinated – Global News

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Waterloo Region says that more than 40 per cent of residents over the age of 18 in the area have now been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

The region’s COVID-19 distribution task force says 192,817 area residents are fully vaccinated, 21,478 more than it reported on Friday.

Read more:
New COVID-19 cases in Waterloo Region continue to trend downward

This pushes the percentage of adults fully vaccinated to 41.57, a number which falls to 33.42 when taking into account the entire population.

“We’re making great progress in our vaccine rollout and continue to vaccinate as many people as we can as quickly as possible,” Regional Chair Karen Redman stated.

“The more our community continues to work together by rolling up their sleeves to get vaccinated and follow public health measures, the closer we are to cautiously moving forward in our recovery and allowing more businesses to safely reopen.”






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Doug Ford says next steps in Ontario’s COVID-19 reopening plan to be announced within 3 weeks


Doug Ford says next steps in Ontario’s COVID-19 reopening plan to be announced within 3 weeks

The goal is to see at least 75 per cent of the population immunized, which in theory would lead to herd immunity.

The region says it surpassed another marking in the coming days, as soon 80 per cent of area adults will have received at least one jab of a COVID-19 vaccine.

That may take time as the task force’s dashboard sits at 79.41 per cent, and it has increased by less than one per cent over the past week.

When you include all those who are eligible to be vaccinated, that number falls to 78.07 per cent.

However, that number may actually cross the 80 per cent line faster as those between the ages of 12-17 are the fastest growing percentage, according to the dashboard.

Read more:
Doug Ford says next steps in Ontario’s COVID-19 reopening plan to be announced within 3 weeks

A total of 63.48 of that age group has been received one dose of a vaccine, a number which stood at 61.69 a week ago.

“Vaccines are the most effective defense against COVID-19 and the Delta variant,” stated Dr. Hsiu-Li Wang, Medical Officer of Health.

“The more residents who get vaccinated, the more we build a wall of protection to keep our community safe and healthy.”

As of Monday, there have been 592,661 jabs administered in the region since the first needle went into an arm with the vaccine on Dec. 22.

© 2021 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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