News/Canada/Edmonton

Seventy-two people have fallen ill after eating salami recalled due to possible salmonella contamination.The Public Health Agency of Canada released an updated notice on an outbreak of salmonella infections linked to Rea brand Genoa Salami Sweet, Rea brand Genoa Salami Hot and Bona brand Mild Genova Salami.The Canadian Food Inspection Agency recalled the products in Ontario, Alberta and Manitoba on June 10.At that time, 57 illnesses had been reported, with 44 in Alberta, 13 in Ontario and none in Manitoba.On Tuesday, the public health agency reported additional cases, bringing Alberta's infections to 57, Ontario to 14 and Manitoba to one.Seven people have been hospitalized since the recall was issued.The federal health agency said most people fell ill between mid-April and mid-June after e...

This First Person column is the experience of Natasha Chiam, who lives in Edmonton. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.In the picture I don't even remember taking, my husband is standing at the entrance to a pediatric ICU patient room, his head resting on his arm as he leans against the frame of the doorway as if it were the only thing holding him up.Inside the room were at least 10 people, all doing their part to save our seven-year-old son who had just gone into cardiac arrest. One of these people, the soft-spoken yet confident senior resident doctor, is up on the hospital bed doing chest compressions on our boy, his large gloved hands covering the whole span of my child's chest.I remember standing about five feet behind my husband. I can't recall w...

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...

Smoke from wildfires burning across Alberta has blanketed much of the province, including the Edmonton region.Edmontonians woke up to worsening air quality — the distinct smell of burning wood and morning skies cloaked in an orange haze. Environment Canada has issued special air quality statements for the city and surrounding regions, while air quality warnings remain in effect for a swath of communities across the northern portion of the province. Air quality and visibility due to wildfire smoke could fluctuate from hour to hour and as smoke levels increase, so do the health risks, Environment Canada cautioned.As of Tuesday morning, the Air Quality Health Index for the Edmonton region was rated at 10+, meaning that residents are at a very high risk from the current levels of air pollution...

A group representing Canada's doctors is challenging the constitutionality of Alberta's legislation banning certain gender-affirming treatments for children under the age of 16, arguing it violates their Charter right to freedom of conscience.The Canadian Medical Association says it filed the challenge Wednesday in Alberta Court of King's Bench. The CMA says the move is meant to protect the relationship between patients and doctors when it comes to making treatment decisions."This is a historic and unprecedented government intrusion into the physician-patient relationship and requires doctors to follow the law rather than clinical guidelines, the needs of patients and their own conscience," the association said in a statement.The legislation was part of a trio of bills affecting transgende...

Organizations that represent Alberta's physicians and nurses say the splitting of the provincial health ministry into two, at the same time Alberta Health Services is broken into four, will create confusion for patients. On Friday, Premier Danielle Smith announced that Adriana LaGrange, formerly the health minister, is now minister of primary and preventative health services and Matt Jones is moving from Jobs, Economy and Trade to become minister of hospital and surgical services. Alberta Health will be divided to reflect the two ministers' areas of responsibility. The province says this completes the breakup of Alberta Health Services, the former province-wide health authority, into four different agencies: Acute Care Alberta, Recovery Alberta, Primary Care Alberta and Assisted Living Alb...

The Alberta government introduced its long-promised and controversial bill on Tuesday to force people with severe substance addictions into involuntary treatment. Bill 53, the Compassionate Intervention Act, lays out the criteria, guidelines and process for a family member or guardian, health-care professional or police officer to get someone into treatment."This program is not for the vast majority of Albertans who suffer from addiction," Dan Williams, Alberta's minister of mental health and addiction, told a news conference in Edmonton."This program is also not a criminal justice program. This is a health-care program … health care should lead to healing, and not harming those who suffer from addiction."The government intends to start opening compassionate intervention beds in existing f...

A Court of King's Bench judge has reserved her decision on the province's request to compel the former CEO of Alberta Health Services to delete work emails she sent to her private account the day before she was fired.Lawyers representing the Alberta government and Alberta Health Services argued in an Edmonton courtroom Friday that the nine emails they know about contain confidential information that belongs to AHS. They are seeking an injunction against Athana Mentzelopoulos from sharing the material. The government also wants the court to compel Mentzelopoulos to face cross-examination by its lawyers to find out who she has already sent that information to. Mentzelopoulos's lawyer Dan Scott called such an exercise, "a fishing expedition."The injunction request is tied to a wrongful dismis...

Alberta's government will soon tie public hospital funding to the number and type of procedures performed, a move critics warn won't improve the public system and will only accelerate private delivery.Premier Danielle Smith said Monday the new "activity-based" model, expected to be implemented for some surgeries in 2026, will drive costs down by fostering competition among public and private providers who will be rewarded for delivering better results."The old top-down approach offers no incentive to do more for patients and limits our ability to direct dollars where they can get the best results," Smith said."The problem here is [that] hospitals miss their target and there's no accountability because they've already got the pot of money."Smith said in publicly funded, privately run surgic...

The overdose prevention site in Red Deer will be closing at the end of the month, following a decision by a judge released Wednesday. Justice C.A. Rickards of Court of King's Bench denied a request by Aaron Brown, a man with opioid use disorder, to keep the OPS open beyond March 31. In January, a different judge granted an interim injunction to continue being open around the clock until the end of March. The government was planning to phase out the site and had already cut operating hours to 12 hours a day. Brown argued that the OPS closure would violate his Charter rights. The judge said in his decision that while Brown had visited the site four times between October and January, he has continued to use drugs three times a day, and said he "cannot conclude that there is a real probability...