News/Health

Members of the World Health Organization reached a landmark agreement on Wednesday on how to learn from COVID-19, which killed millions of people in 2020-22, and prepare the world for future pandemics.Sticking points on the road to the deal included how to share drugs and vaccines fairly between wealthy countries and poorer ones.The legally binding pact is widely seen as a victory for the global health agency at a time when multilateral organizations like the WHO have been battered by sharp cuts in U.S. foreign funding."After more than three years of intensive negotiations, WHO member states took a major step forward in efforts to make the world safer from pandemics," the health body said in a statement.U.S. negotiators left the discussions after President Donald Trump began a 12-month pro...

A new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests autism diagnosis rates continue to rise in the U.S., sparking inflammatory rhetoric from government officials, while experts largely attribute the trend to improved screening and better understanding of the condition. The CDC reported Tuesday that an estimated one in 31 eight-year-olds in the U.S. have autism, using data from 14 states and Puerto Rico in 2022. The previous estimate — from 2020 — was one in 36.The CDC checked health and school records for eight-year-olds for its estimate, because most cases are diagnosed by that age. Boys continue to be diagnosed more than girls, and the highest rates are among children who are Asian/Pacific Islander, Indigenous and Black.The CDC acknowledges that its repor...

Babies and children up to age four could be breathing in plasticizers and other chemicals from their mattresses while they sleep, a Canadian study suggests.Federal regulations set limits on some phthalates or plasticizers, which are substances added to products to make them more flexible.Miriam Diamond, an environmental chemist at the University of Toronto, and her team designed an experiment to estimate how much of the compounds are released into a child's sleeping area from 16 different mattresses.In Tuesday's issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology, the researchers reported that two of the mattresses tested did not comply with Canadian regulations for two phthalates and two plasticizers in consumer products. The regulations are based on potential harm to human health...

Brenndon Goodman was nine years old when a doctor told him he would be dead by 30 if he couldn't get his weight under control."You're going through all the issues a normal nine-year-old goes through. On top of that, also being told you're overweight, you're an aberration. For me, I felt like I was a failure," said Goodman, 30, who lives in Thornhill, Ont.He said he remembers endless — and unhelpful — appointments at weight-loss programs that amounted to cookie-cutter diet plans and shame. What finally worked was when a team of doctors, dietitians, specialists and psychologists at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children started telling him about the psychological and genetic aspects of obesity.That kind of collaborative and inclusive approach should be what all doctors and nurses take when tre...

This story is part of CBC Health's Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.Dr. Michelle Barton has been working at the heart of Ontario's measles outbreak for months, trying to contain the damage the highly-infectious disease can wreak on children hospitalized with the virus. Barton heads up the pediatric infectious disease team at London Health Sciences Centre children's hospital in the province's southwest, the region with the highest rate of the illness. "We offer the best treatment that we can under the circumstances," Barton said. "If the child proceeds to deterioration, that is difficult to watch because you know that you probably wouldn't be here ...

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged that the country's top health agency will pinpoint the cause of autism by September, an announcement which sparked a wave of concern among medical experts and advocates who question the feasibility and focus of the research.Kennedy — a longtime vaccine critic who has pushed a discredited theory that routine childhood shots cause autism — said Thursday that the effort will involve hundreds of scientists. He shared the plans with U.S. President Donald Trump during a televised cabinet meeting. Trump suggested that vaccines could be to blame for autism rates, even though decades of research have concluded there is no link between the two. "There's got to be something artificial out there that's doing this," Trump told Kennedy, later sayin...

A nurse practitioner whose research at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children is dedicated to helping children and teens manage pain has won a Gairdner Award.The Toronto-based Gairdner Foundation says Jennifer Stinson is the first nurse to receive one of the prestigious awards it hands out annually to recognize scientists who contribute to human health around the world.Reached by phone in Australia where she was set to speak at a scientific gathering, Stinson says it's "great" the prize is recognizing the role nurses play in research."Nurses are very good at listening to patients and learning from them and then trying to figure out what kind of solutions would be best for them," Stinson said, noting that a lot of her research is "team science" with researchers from multiple disciplines.Stins...

A Canadian researcher has won a 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for discovering the GLP-1 hormone used in diabetes and obesity medications — including Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro — that have changed the lives of millions of people around the world.Dr. Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist and a clinician-scientist at the University of Toronto and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health, shares the $3 million US prize with four colleagues from the United States and Denmark.They were all involved in the development of the now-famous drugs manufactured by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. Drucker and three co-winners made discoveries about glucagon-like peptide-1 in their labs. The other recipient of the award, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, who works for Novo Nordisk, led the way ...

This story is part of CBC Health's Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.Many top scientists in the U.S. are now out of a job.Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is aiming to cut 20,000 jobs at agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration FDA).Not all of them are scientists, but Canada could have a role to play in making sure American scientists are able to continue their research, say researchers on both sides of the border. Anecdotally, Canadian academics say they're hearing daily from American colleagues looking for job opportunities in Canada. One...

Health officials in three Ontario hotspots for measles are focusing on communication and vaccination to help get the outbreaks under control.Public Health Ontario on Thursday reported 89 new cases of measles since March 26, bringing the province's total of confirmed and probable cases this year to 655. They have been linked to a travel-related case in New Brunswick. "The sharp increase… is due to continued exposures and transmission among individuals who have not been immunized," the report's authors wrote.In the Southwestern Public Health region — which includes the communities of St. Thomas, Woodstock as well as Elgin and Oxford counties — there are 43 new cases, the largest increase in the province for the most recent reporting period. Measles is "one of the most contagious illnesses gl...