Health

An advocate for New Brunswick patients suffering from unusual neurological symptoms is calling for the retraction of a recent scientific report that found no evidence of a mystery brain disease in the province.Katherine Lanteigne, the former executive director of BloodWatch, is alleging research bias and privacy breaches in the study published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA Neurology.Lanteigne said she has written to the University Health Network's research ethics board in Toronto and to the Horizon Health Network and its MIND Clinic in Moncton. She intends to file formal complaints of research misconduct as well.She has asked the University Health Network, or UHN, to issue a formal apology for allegedly "flagrantly violating the privacy and dignity ...

Patients who identify as Indigenous, African or Black are generally spending longer in Winnipeg emergency department waiting rooms than white people, according to a new report examining how different racial groups experience patient care.The data also found Indigenous patients and white patients present with similar triage scores — a measure of how severe their medical issues are — which counters "the common stereotype of Indigenous people using the emergency departments inappropriately," says the report prepared by Dr. Marcia Anderson, who led the race, ethnicity and Indigenous identity data project team on behalf of Manitoba Shared Health.It also found patients who are African and/or Black wait the longest to be seen, on average, even though they're among the most likely to present with ...

The Alberta premier's announcement of her intent to restore local decision making to public health facilities is highlighting a philosophical divide in how to best manage the province's stretched health budget.Premier Danielle Smith published a video online Tuesday, saying decisions about hiring health-care workers or replacing hospital furniture belong with individual health centres, not Alberta Health Services (AHS) managers."Soon, each facility will have an empowered leadership team supporting our sites, responsible for hiring, managing resources, and solving problems without sending every request into the vortex," Smith said in the video.The shift is part of a massive restructuring of health-care in the province, in which the government has broken the oversight of care into four new ag...

As a large blue and purple flag was raised at Moncton's City Hall on Monday, Caroline Jose stood underneath it smiling, arm in arm with her 15-year-old son, Louis.Jose has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and her son, Louis Hébert Chatelain, is autistic and also has ADHD.Both of them are the reason Canada's first neurodiversity pride flag was raised in New Brunswick."It felt like I was belonging to a community that I never felt before," Jose said. "That's what I wanted, so to me it's very important."Jose, the national co-ordinator for Neurodiversity Pride Day in Canada, says she hopes other provinces will follow suit and hoist their own flags in time for next year's day of recognition. (Katelin Belliveau/CBC)The flag, which includes a white kite and small infinity signs on its tail...

This is the first of two articles that will focus on the issue of drug overdoses in Quebec, where the situation is heading and what needs to be done to curb this trend.The 911 caller was in a state of shock.A little after 4 p.m. on Sunday Sept. 10, 2023, the caller stumbled upon a group of five people and most of them, if not all, looked either unconscious or dead.According to Urgences-santé's call records, the first team of paramedics arrived at the corner of Ontario and St-Dominique streets in downtown Montreal in two minutes and four seconds. At least four more ambulances and two advanced-care emergency vehicles followed soon after.There was also a supervisor on site to help manage the chaos.The final tally: six overdoses — not five — and two of them were fatal.A scene like this one is ...

Maxine Peigan says the Auntie Program was inspired by her own nieces."I have six nieces  between the ages five to 16," she said. "Each of them are impacted by the social issues that we're all faced with here in Canada."Peigan, a registered mental health therapist originally from Pasqua First Nation in Saskatchewan, created the eight-week Auntie Program, which focuses on social issues that impact young Indigenous girls in smaller First Nations communities.She takes pride in providing a safe and supportive place for her nieces when they needed to talk."If I could be a safe person for my nieces, I need to create a program for other children, other than just counselling. That's kind of the core of how it all kind of snowballed together."Last month, Peigan was invited to Peepeekisis Cree Nation...

The U.S. has approved the world's only twice-a-year shot to prevent HIV, its maker Gilead Sciences announced Wednesday.It's the first step in an anticipated global rollout that could protect millions — although it's unclear how many in the U.S. and abroad will get access to the powerful new option.While a vaccine to prevent HIV still is needed, some experts say this medication — a drug called lenacapavir — could be the next best thing. It nearly eliminated new infections in two groundbreaking studies of people at high risk, better than daily preventive pills they can forget to take."This really has the possibility of ending HIV transmission," said Greg Millett, public policy director at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.Condoms help guard against HIV infection if used properly, but s...

Bethany Murray experienced two early pregnancy losses last year and wishes the wait for follow-up mental health care had been smoother.Last winter, when Murray was five-weeks pregnant, she realized she was bleeding heavily and rushed to the emergency department. She was devastated to learn the pregnancy was ending. She and her husband tried again months later, but during an ultrasound appointment, she learned her second pregnancy had also ended early."My brain was just spinning," Murray recalled. "You blame everything on yourself, even though at the end of the day, you finally know there's nothing you did."About 15 per cent of pregnancies end before 14 weeks gestation, according to the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC). Some will suffer early pregnancy loss, comm...

If you've recently witnessed a 10-year-old smear their face with an $80 anti-wrinkle cream — either in real life or in any number of "Get Ready With Me" TikTok videos — you're probably already aware of the "Sephora kids" skin-care trend that has young people clamouring for anti-aging products thanks in part to what they see on social media.Now, a new study published in Pediatrics this month, the first peer-reviewed paper of its kind, found that skin-care solutions promoted on TikTok not only offer little to no benefit for children and teens, but they can actually be harmful. And the risks go beyond skin damage (although, there is that, too), the authors note."It's problematic to show girls devoting this much time and attention to their skin," corresponding author Dr. Molly Hales, a postdoc...

In some ways, Najiha Raman is not so different from other 17-year-olds. She crams sometimes for exams. She struggles with some subjects in high school and excels in others. But in one important aspect, she's quite different from most of her peers. Since she was about seven, she's been taking care of her mom, who was diagnosed with ALS when Najiha was three years old."Sometimes, I would try to help her with the wheelchair — but it was a lot bigger than me," she remembers.  It was years before Rahman realized that her responsibilities — such as helping her mom drink water, eat food, adjusting her body when she was uncomfortable —  were not quite typical for kids her age. Rahman says her dad and sister tried their best to shield her from those responsibilities, but there was so much to do tha...