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The federal government’s decision to delay the second dose of lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines by upwards of four months has been controversial. What is not controversial is that our heroic health-care workers deserve all the protection they can get, because they are the ones putting themselves in harm’s way on a daily basis. And yet, they too are being forced to wait unreasonably long periods of time to get the protection they need. Now, two physicians from Belleville, Ont., have gone public to explain why front-line health-care workers deserve second vaccine doses immediately.
“There is good benefit from one dose; however, if two doses provides the best protection against death, hospitalization, infection and transmission, this is the level of protection we want for our front-line health-care workers,” wrote Dr. Michele Miron, an emergency physician, and Dr. David Weinstein, a nephrologist, on a local news website. “This level of protection is critical for t
About two years ago, Suzanne noticed that her daughter was getting thinner and thinner. The Ottawa resident suspected that her daughter, then 14, had developed bulimia. By December 2019, she was struggling to get out of bed and looked gravely ill. Her parents were worried about her heart: purging a symptom of bulimia that can involve self-induced vomiting, laxative misuse, and other behaviours can cause imbalances of the electrolytes that help maintain a regular heart rhythm.
In January 2020, Suzanne’s daughter agreed to go on a wait-list for an eating-disorder clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. About two months later, as COVID-19 began upending the world, their family doctor instructed her to go to the emergency room immediately. She was admitted to the hospital’s inpatient eating-disorder program later that day.
Brandon Sun
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Drug overdose deaths nearly doubled in Brandon in 2020, a trend mirrored across Manitoba.
In 2019, there were seven deaths attributed to drug overdoses reported in the city, according to Brandon police, but in 2020 that jumped to 12.
Brandon and Area Overdose Awareness chair Antoinette Gravel-Ouellette, left, and Samaritan House Ministries executive director Barbara McNish in 2020. Drug overdose deaths nearly doubled in Brandon in 2020, a trend mirrored across Manitoba. (Submitted)
Manitoba as a whole experienced 372 overdose deaths in 2020, an 87 per cent surge over the year before, according to data from Manitoba’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The increase is staggering, said Brandon and Area Overdose Awareness chair Antoinette Gravel-Ouellette and the pandemic is largely to blame.
Posted: May 06, 2021 5:00 AM CT | Last Updated: May 6
In Manitoba, total hospitalizations due to substance harm increased by 16 per cent from March 2020 to September 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.(Travis Golby/CBC)
No other province saw a sharper rise in hospitalizations for substance use than Manitoba did during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, new data shows.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information, a non-profit that provides information about health care in Canada, released a report Thursday about impacts on harms caused by substance use from the pandemic.
It analyzed provincial and territorial emergency department and hospital data from March 2020 to September 2020, compared to the same period the year before.