The Brandon Regional Health Centre’s main entrance is pictured. (File)
Two cases of COVID-19 linked to the Assiniboine Centre at the Brandon Regional Health Centre over the weekend were found in health-care workers and the third was found in a patient, chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin said Monday.
The patient likely contracted the virus at the facility, according to Roussin.
“It looks like we had a client who tested positive who had been admitted much longer than the incubation period and then we had the two staff who tested positive,” he said. “That’s the only connection we can come up with right now. … This client was certainly in too long to have been exposed outside the facility.”
These three cases at the hospital were first identified on Sunday, but more specifics were not provided until Monday’s COVID briefing. A government spokesperson said in an email that only those who are considered to have been in close contact with people who tested positive will be contacted by health officials.
In a statement emailed to the Sun, Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson said her union is not aware of any of the positive cases in Brandon being nurses. Jackson also expressed concern regarding the outbreaks at Brandon care homes and called for greater transparency from the government.
Fairview Personal Care Home in Brandon. (Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun)
“In most cases, nurses learn of outbreaks in health facilities at the same time as the general public. We are advocating for improved information sharing with nurses and other health-care professionals, and believe enhanced transparency in the immediate and long term is critical for a robust and effective public health response to COVID-19.”
Additionally, Roussin announced that an investigation discovered that a previously identified case of COVID-19 is a health-care worker at the Fairview Personal Care Home in Brandon and is a close contact of a previously known case. Close contacts of the health-care worker are being identified and the case investigation continues.
See ‘XXX’ — Page A2
Though the risk of transmission is considered low, the entire Fairview Personal Care Home has been moved to level red in the province’s health restriction system and outbreak protocols are being undertaken to reduce the risk to staff and residents. This means that like that the Hillcrest Place and Rideau Park care homes in Brandon, visitations are being restricted.
Asked about what concerns he has about the health-care system with cases found in four facilities in Brandon and a care home in Steinbach, Roussin said he believes there has been a bit of a breakdown when it comes to people following preventive guidelines.
“We’ve seen on a number of occasions out in the public with the spread in Brandon that there’s a lot of fatigue out there with adhering to the fundamentals, adhering to the guidelines that did such a good job of protecting us in that first wave,” Roussin said. “When we see the spread in these personal care homes, we can see that it’s challenging to be using PPE consistently, it’s challenging to do that for so long.”
Hillcrest Place Personal Care Home in Brandon. (Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun)
Most of Brandon is still under level orange, but the second floor of the Assiniboine Centre at the hospital as well as the three care homes named above are under level red. As reported last week, the Brandon School Division is operating under less severe level yellow restrictions.
Officials are also warning that possible exposure to the virus may have occurred at Frederickson Performance Centre at Unit F-1212 18th St. in Brandon from 7 to 8:30 a.m. on Aug. 17 and from 9 to 10:30 a.m. on Aug. 23. The risk of transmission is considered low, but those potentially exposed and having symptoms appear are encouraged to get tested.
During the briefing, Roussin was asked why Manitoba hasn’t signed on to the federal government’s contact tracing smartphone app eight days before school starts. He said that the federal government decides what order provinces join the app and it hasn’t been Manitoba’s turn yet. He added that the help won’t eliminate the need for other contact tracing measures.
In total, there were 28 new cases of COVID-19 detected as of 9:30 a.m. Monday, including 13 in Prairie Mountain Health. The number of active cases in Brandon has risen to 168, with 127 people having recovered.
There were also seven cases found in the Winnipeg health region, six cases in the Southern Health-Santé Sud health region and two in the Interlake-Eastern health region.
Of the cases announced Monday, 14 were related to close contact with previously identified cases and one was related to travel. In the last week, Public Health has been unable to identify a source for 32 cases, 16 of which were in Prairie Mountain Health. Since July 1, there have been 423 cases detected in Prairie Mountain Health.
Roussin said that there are 83 cases linked to employees at “a business in Brandon,” which is how he has previously described the cases connected to Maple Leaf Foods’ pork processing plant. While the government’s numbers and the union representing workers’ numbers didn’t line up last week, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 832 communications director Chris Noto said their figures also list 83 cases among their members.
A further 20 cases link to the business cluster and the Prairie Mountain Health cluster, Roussin said.
In the province as a whole, there are 469 active cases, with 11 people hospitalized and one person in intensive care. Manitoba’s five-day test positivity rate is now at 2.1 per cent. There have been 280 cases linked to communal living, 115 of them currently active.
Effective today, all visitors to health-care facilities in Manitoba will be required to wear a non-medical mask to be allowed to enter. Those exempt are people who cannot put on or take off a mask without assistance, those who have a medical condition that prevents them from safely wearing a mask or children under five years of age.
On Thursday, travel restrictions for northern Manitoba and isolated communities are being reinstated. Those exempt from those restrictions are residents of those regions or people intending to set up a permanent residence, people travelling directly to lodges and campgrounds, government staff, health providers, people seeking emergency health care, business owners and operators and travel related to parenting arrangements.
Full details of those travel restrictions will be posted online on Thursday. Roussin also encouraged Manitobans to obey travel restrictions put in place by First Nations communities.
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.”
___
AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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.
___
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.
