Viruses & Vaccines
he sale of costly Covid ventilators as scrap metal was “the height of incompetence,” the Commons was told yesterday. Federal agencies have yet to explain why new $22,000 medical devices were auctioned for as little as $305 for lots of 51, the equivalent of $6 apiece.
“Any government can promise to spend money,” said Conservative MP Dean Allison (Niagara West, Ont.). “This government is awesome at spending and awesome at making promises. What they are terrible at is actually delivering and what they are absolutely incompetent at is managing taxpayers’ money in a responsible way.”
“What happened to all those ventilators?” asked MP Allison. “Some of them are still in the wrap, still on loading docks, and being sold for $6 as parts. This is the height of incompetence.”
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Read MoreA new $15-million cross-border research project is underway to monitor the movement of pathogens in Canada and the U.S. in the event of future pandemics.
The federal government put up the money that will cover four years of equipment and research.
The Integrated Network for the Surveillance of Pathogens: Increasing Resilience and Capacity in Canada’s Pandemic Response (INSPIRE) brings together 43 researchers from seven universities and public and private agencies. The team consists of biochemists, microbiologists, engineers, computer scientists, and supply chain public policy experts.
INSPIRE will partner with academics in Michigan, Ohio and New York —
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One measure of the privately borne cost of wait times is the value of time that is lost while waiting for treatment.
Valuing only hours lost during the average work week, the estimated cost of waiting for care in Canada for patients who were in the queue in 2023 was almost $3.5 billion. This works out to an average of about $2,871 for each of the estimated 1,209,194 Canadians waiting for treatment in 2023.
This is a conservative estimate that places no intrinsic value on the time individuals spend waiting in a reduced capacity outside of the work week. Valuing all hours of the week, including evenings and weekends but excluding eight hours of sleep per night, would increase the estimated cost of waiting to $10.6 billion, or about $8,730 per person.
This estimate only counts costs that are borne by the individual waiting for treatment. The costs of care provided by family members (the time spent caring for the individual waiting for treatment) and their lost productivity
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Read MoreA new strain of an animal virus is expected to spread across England, experts have warned as livestock farmers face a destructive impact.
There is a “very high probability” bluetongue virus will spread by infected midges which have swept in from northern Europe.
In England, there have been 126 cases on cattle and sheep farms – which does not affect people or food safety.
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Read MoreThe Canadian Press
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Cancer patients in need of blood transfusions have been facing delays because of a “grave shortage” of medical technologists at the McGill Univerity Health Centre, The Gazette has learned.
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Read MoreThe recent reports from the United States about H5N1 being detected in the milk supply is concerning. It means that avian influenza has spread to dairy cattle and was probably spreading undetected since late December, far be
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Read MoreThe Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, which helps those left disabled after having a vaccine and families of those who died, is to be reviewed after a massive rise in claims following the Covid jab rollout. The Mail has more.
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins has asked officials in her department to look at how the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS) could be reformed.
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Read MoreScientists have created a jab to help protect against multiple coronaviruses, even the ones ‘we don’t even know about yet’, according to its creators.
Created by experts from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Caltech in California, the project aims to ‘proactively’ build a vaccine before the next potential pandemic causing pathogen even becomes threat.
The experimental shot, which has so far only been tested on mice, works by training the immune system to recognise parts of many different coronaviruses, a family of viruses that includes Covid, SARS and MERS.
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