To barbecue safely and avoid foodborne illnesses takes four key steps.
Watch Marilyn Lee, a professor of food safety at Ryerson University in Toronto, show CBC's Kim Bruhuber how to prepare, cook and serve meat from a backyard BBQ.
They cover:
Provincial government funding to reduce home care wait times in Ontario will primarily go towards slashing wait times for patients with who aren't necessarily in need of acute care, says the head of Waterloo Wellington home care agency.
Patients in hospital who have a high level of need are already being assessed quickly, "within a day, sometimes two", said Gordon Milak, the CEO of the Waterloo Wellington Community Care Access Centre (CCAC), in a panel discussion with Craig Norris on The Morning Edition Friday.
But the Waterloo Wellington CCAC wait times for initial assessments for those with non-acute needs are among the highest in the province.
The provincial government has invested $260 million in its budget for the year to achieve that goal, with $185 million going directly to local CCACs for home care delivery. But there are no specifics on how that money will be allocated.
The government funding comes with the goal of reducing wait times across the board to just five days in CCACs across Ontario.
Milak said his agency's priority "would be addressing those moderate to lower needs clients that we can move them within that five-day period.
"As well as, how can we continue to evolve an effective and safe home approach? Again ultimately getting people into the right care setting is the goal," he added, saying it would apply whether it's long-term care or home-based care."
For lower needs clients, Milak admits that the CCAC has the opportunity to improve on their services and speed up access to care.
For more, listen to the entire panel discussion below.
Featured guests:
- John Hirdes, Ontario home care research chair, professor University of Waterloo.
- Jane Meadus, a lawyer with the Advocacy Center for the Elderly.
- Gordon Milak, the CEO of the Waterloo Wellington CCAC.
A move to create babies with DNA from three people to avoid passing on rare, incurable diseases has government backing in the U.K.
The procedure, known as three genetic parents or mitochondrial replacement technology, involves DNA from a man's sperm, DNA from a woman's egg and healthy mitochondrial DNA from another woman.
Mitochondria are the powerhouses of cells. The adaptation of in vitro fertilization technology is likened to replacing the mitochondrial DNA "battery" in a laptop.
The techniques are currently used in labs in Britain and the U.S., but the modified embryos haven't been implanted into women.
When faulty mitochondria are inherited from a woman, diseases such as muscular dystrophy, epilepsy and heart problems can result with varying degrees of severity. The diseases affect round one in 6,500 children worldwide.
"Scientists have developed ground-breaking new procedures which could stop these diseases being passed on, bringing hope to many families seeking to prevent their children inheriting them," Sally Davies, U.K.'s chief medical officer, told reporters.
"It's only right that we look to introduce this life-saving treatment as soon as we can."
Any final decision on putting the regulations in place to allow the new treatments will be subject to a vote in Parliament. Davies hopes the first patients will receive the treatment within two years.
Under Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Act, it's illegal to knowingly "alter the genome of a cell of a human being or in vitro embryo such that the alteration is capable of being transmitted to descendants."
For Tim Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in Health Law & Policy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, if the technique is shown to be safe and effective, then it seems ethically appropriate.
"While it is unclear how the law would be interpreted, some may believe the technique infringes several of our bans," Caulfield said in an email.
The Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society represents doctors and researchers working on assisted reproductive technologies.
The group's president, Dr. Matt Gysler, who practises in Mississauga, Ont., cautioned the technology isn't ready for day-to-day use by responsible physicians in Canada.
"Looks to me, like in Britain, very responsible steps are taken before it is widely opened, so it can develop in a safe environment and protect the unborn and protect society and give mothers appropriate options and choices."
One of the main concerns raised during public consultations by Britain's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority was designer babies.
"Once you have crossed that crucial ethical line of not manipulating genetically human beings, then it is very hard to go back and avoid slipping down that slippery slope," said Dr. David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, a London-based watchdog group that opposes genetic discrimination.
Françoise Baylis, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, pointed out that there is more than one way to be a parent.
"I would say that unless you're deeply committed to … belief that biology is what matters in making families, there are other ways of having a child and having a family that don't require the investment of time, talent, energy, money to allow five to 10 people a year to have a child that's genetically related to them," said Baylis.
"These women could easily use donor eggs and in fact that's what happens with a number of other underlying genetic conditions."
With files from CBC's Amina Zafar, The Associated Press and ReutersAfter 18-year-old Steven Hutchison took his own life in his dorm room at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., earlier this year, a lot of his close friends kept in touch with his parents.
Young people who had known the popular, ever-smiling athlete brought his mother, Myrna Hutchison, a memory book with notes from groups of his friends and told her they wanted to do something.
'What we know is that Steven struggled and suffered in silence.'—Myrna Hutchison
"It just seemed that we needed something to help get us through this," says Hutchison.
"We needed to work towards a common goal and I thought maybe we could start planning an event of some sort."
That event unfolds today on the streets of Hutchison's hometown of Arthur, Ont., north of Kitchener. More than 500 people have signed up to take part in the Get In Touch For Hutch walkathon and race.
But Get In Touch For Hutch is more than a chance for participants to lace up their running shoes and get some exercise.
Funds raised will be directed toward organizations that support youth mental health. And from it all, organizers hope they can get young people talking and lay more groundwork for removing stigmas attached to suicide and mental illness.
"What we know is that Steven struggled and suffered in silence," says his mother.
"There was an amount of personal pride there that didn't allow him to feel comfortable talking about his feelings or the pressures or everyday stresses that he may have been experiencing like we all do."
"Our ultimate goal is … to erase the stigma that's attached to that. We don't want people to feel judged or ridiculed or to be any less of the person than they truly are because they talk about their feelings or emotions."
Getting people to talk about suicide and mental illness is not always easy. People may not wish to talk about feelings of depression. Deaths by suicide are not always publicly identified as such by families, or identified in the same way that deaths from cancer or heart disease might be described.
Instead, it could perhaps be a "hunting accident." Or maybe a person's death would be described as occurring "suddenly, at home." Or maybe it was only whispered about — or not talked about at all.
Friends and teammates of Daron Richardson wore purple and sold bracelets to raise money for the Do it For Daron campaign at their high school on Feb. 8, 2011. (CBC) Get In Touch For Hutch joins initiatives such as D.I.F.D (Do It For Daron), a foundation created after the 2010 suicide of Daron Richardson, the 14-year-old daughter of former Ottawa Senators assistant coach Luke Richardson and his wife Stephanie, in taking a more open, public approach.
And they're being driven in large part by the young people who were immediately touched by their deaths.
"To be honest, I think the initiative started with the youth and … our goal was to support that in any possible way," says Stephanie Richardson.
"When we had young people ask us, 'Would you be upset if we made helmet stickers, would you be upset if we made bracelets,' our answer was always no."
D.I.F.D. aims to increase awareness and get people talking about youth mental health, and works with the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre towards those goals. Richardson says the achievements of the initiative have been remarkable.
"I think for Luke and I, as time went on … we were determined … that this wasn't going to be ignored. Our goal was that those conversations would happen in every home, in every school, in every hockey rink and in the community at large.
"And then you saw big people step up, like the Ottawa Sens Foundation, and say we're open to this conversation, we're going to have a night."
Otttawa-area youth take part in an event in May 2011 to raise awareness about youth mental health. The youth sat in the buses to represent the three busloads of Ontario children and youth that would kill themselves that year. (Courtesy Royal Ottawa Mental Health Group) The Richardsons, who now live in Binghamton, N.Y., where Luke is head coach of the Binghamton Senators, were back in Ottawa this week and received honorary degrees from Algonquin College.
Stephanie has taken part in various public events and was on hand in Ottawa in April when Olympian Clara Hughes announced she will do a cross-country bike ride to talk to people about mental health.
"It's pretty powerful to see people get behind it, but it's more just to create that dialogue and it became … the need for the kids to speak and use their voice and they kept doing it and I would say that it was more everybody following that lead," says Stephanie.
For Hutchison, there is the hope that the message resonating from today's event in Arthur will get people thinking differently about mental illness.
"I think we have to find opportunities in everything we're involved in. For example … I think back about my boys going to hundreds of different arenas across Ontario and never once seeing a poster or banner about mental health support or Kids Help Phone or the crisis line," she says.
"I haven't followed up with Brock, but I wonder about even something as simple as having a magnet or a sticker in that dorm room that had the crisis line on it — if Steven had seen that, would he have taken a second thought to make a call rather than end his life the way he did?"
Both Richardson and Hutchison have seen another phenomenon emerge: because people know of their family's experiences, they approach them with stories of how suicide has touched their families.
Stephanie Richardson, wife of former Ottawa Senators assistant coach Luke Richardson, is pictured at the Scotiabank Place during the IIHF Women's World Hockey Championships in Ottawa on April 3, 2013. The Richardsons' foundation Do It For Daron was the official charity of this year's WWHC. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press) "The biggest showing of support for me has been that people have started talking. People are feeling OK to get in touch with me to share their personal stories," says Hutchison.
"I know stories, two in specific, that have been shared with me just recently in that people have experienced losses through suicide 20 years or so ago and just now are having their first conversations about that."
Richardson says "what is happening is overwhelming." At Algonquin this week, students stopped on stage to thank her and her husband and tell stories of themselves or others they know seeking help.
"Because of the conversations and because of the openness of our daughter's death, there has been major change and it's not because of us. It's because each person sees [themselves] in it and they're comfortable" telling their stories.
Richardson would like to see discussions of mental health issues become mainstream in the education system, and that there be no different value placed on any death, whether it is by cancer, heart disease or suicide.
"I don't understand why the value is different…. That really does not make sense to me, but it seems … some people feel like there's a shame with it, that there's a lesser value of that person. That makes absolutely no sense to me."
Ultimately, for the Richardsons, going public about their daughter's death wasn't necessarily a choice.
"I think it just came with part of our life, with the career that my husband had," says Stephanie Richardson.
"It's a mixed blessing, but we are also very blessed that we do have therapy and we believe in it and that is very, very helpful to have medical help for ourselves."
One thing, she says, though, is that being public about suicide doesn't "take away our despair, our loss or the endless unanswered questions."
Luke Richardson, left, and Dr. Raj Bhatla, chief of psychiatry at Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, speak on the issue of teen suicide in Ottawa on Feb. 24, 2011. (Sean kilpatrick/Canadian Press) "Being public didn't help that. It didn't make it any easier. It didn't make it any worse but it doesn't make it easier. I certainly wouldn't want someone to think if they were public that it eases that sense of despair, loss and desperation to want to answer all those unanswered questions."
Dr. Raj Bhatla, chief of psychiatry of the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, says there are a variety of ways families might cope with the suicide of a child. They need to be able to make the choices that suit them best, he says.
"It's really a private choice of the family. It's neither good nor bad to go public," Bhatla says.
"There shouldn't be a value judgment — go forward publicly or you don't go forward publicly. It's really for each individual family to make that choice. The losses remain."
To barbecue safely and avoid foodborne illnesses takes four key steps.
Watch Marilyn Lee, a professor of food safety at Ryerson University in Toronto, show CBC's Kim Bruhuber how to prepare, cook and serve meat from a backyard BBQ.
They cover:
Provincial government funding to reduce home care wait times in Ontario will primarily go towards slashing wait times for patients with who aren't necessarily in need of acute care, says the head of Waterloo Wellington home care agency.
Patients in hospital who have a high level of need are already being assessed quickly, "within a day, sometimes two", said Gordon Milak, the CEO of the Waterloo Wellington Community Care Access Centre (CCAC), in a panel discussion with Craig Norris on The Morning Edition Friday.
But the Waterloo Wellington CCAC wait times for initial assessments for those with non-acute needs are among the highest in the province.
The provincial government has invested $260 million in its budget for the year to achieve that goal, with $185 million going directly to local CCACs for home care delivery. But there are no specifics on how that money will be allocated.
The government funding comes with the goal of reducing wait times across the board to just five days in CCACs across Ontario.
Milak said his agency's priority "would be addressing those moderate to lower needs clients that we can move them within that five-day period.
"As well as, how can we continue to evolve an effective and safe home approach? Again ultimately getting people into the right care setting is the goal," he added, saying it would apply whether it's long-term care or home-based care."
For lower needs clients, Milak admits that the CCAC has the opportunity to improve on their services and speed up access to care.
For more, listen to the entire panel discussion below.
Featured guests:
- John Hirdes, Ontario home care research chair, professor University of Waterloo.
- Jane Meadus, a lawyer with the Advocacy Center for the Elderly.
- Gordon Milak, the CEO of the Waterloo Wellington CCAC.
A move to create babies with DNA from three people to avoid passing on rare, incurable diseases has government backing in the U.K.
The procedure, known as three genetic parents or mitochondrial replacement technology, involves DNA from a man's sperm, nuclear DNA from a woman's egg that would normally pass on the disease and healthy mitochondrial DNA from another woman.
Mitochondria are the powerhouses of cells. The adaptation of in vitro fertilization technology is likened to replacing the mitochondrial DNA "battery" in a laptop.
The techniques are currently used in labs in Britain and the U.S., but the modified embryos haven't been implanted into women.
When faulty mitochondria are inherited, diseases such as muscular dystrophy, epilepsy and heart problems can result with varying degrees of severity. The diseases affect round one in 6,500 children worldwide.
"Scientists have developed ground-breaking new procedures which could stop these diseases being passed on, bringing hope to many families seeking to prevent their children inheriting them," Sally Davies, U.K.'s chief medical officer, told reporters.
"It's only right that we look to introduce this life-saving treatment as soon as we can."
Any final decision on putting the regulations in place to allow the new treatments will be subject to a vote in Parliament. Davies hopes the first patients will receive the treatment within two years.
Under Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Act, it's illegal to knowingly "alter the genome of a cell of a human being or in vitro embryo such that the alteration is capable of being transmitted to descendants."
For Tim Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in Health Law & Policy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, if the technique is shown to be safe and effective, then it seems ethically appropriate.
"While it is unclear how the law would be interpreted, some may believe the technique infringes several of our bans," Caulfield said in an email.
The Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society represents doctors and researchers working on assisted reproductive technologies.
The group's president, Dr. Matt Gysler, who practises in Mississauga, Ont., cautioned the technology isn't ready for day-to-day use by responsible physicians in Canada.
"Looks to me, like in Britain, very responsible steps are taken before it is widely opened, so it can develop in a safe environment and protect the unborn and protect society and give mothers appropriate options and choices."
One of the main concerns raised during public consultations by Britain's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority was designer babies.
"Once you have crossed that crucial ethical line of not manipulating genetically human beings, then it is very hard to go back and avoid slipping down that slippery slope," said Dr. David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, a London-based watchdog group that opposes genetic discrimination.
Françoise Baylis, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, pointed out that there is more than one way to be a parent.
"I would say that unless you're deeply committed to … belief that biology is what matters in making families, there are other ways of having a child and having a family that don't require the investment of time, talent, energy, money to allow five to 10 people a year to have a child that's genetically related to them," said Baylis.
"These women could easily use donor eggs and in fact that's what happens with a number of other underlying genetic conditions."
With files from CBC's Amina Zafar, The Associated Press and ReutersAfter 18-year-old Steven Hutchison took his own life in his dorm room at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., earlier this year, a lot of his close friends kept in touch with his parents.
Young people who had known the popular, ever-smiling athlete brought his mother, Myrna Hutchison, a memory book with notes from groups of his friends and told her they wanted to do something.
'What we know is that Steven struggled and suffered in silence.'—Myrna Hutchison
"It just seemed that we needed something to help get us through this," says Hutchison.
"We needed to work towards a common goal and I thought maybe we could start planning an event of some sort."
That event unfolds today on the streets of Hutchison's hometown of Arthur, Ont., north of Kitchener. More than 500 people have signed up to take part in the Get In Touch For Hutch walkathon and race.
But Get In Touch For Hutch is more than a chance for participants to lace up their running shoes and get some exercise.
Funds raised will be directed toward organizations that support youth mental health. And from it all, organizers hope they can get young people talking and lay more groundwork for removing stigmas attached to suicide and mental illness.
"What we know is that Steven struggled and suffered in silence," says his mother.
"There was an amount of personal pride there that didn't allow him to feel comfortable talking about his feelings or the pressures or everyday stresses that he may have been experiencing like we all do."
"Our ultimate goal is … to erase the stigma that's attached to that. We don't want people to feel judged or ridiculed or to be any less of the person than they truly are because they talk about their feelings or emotions."
Getting people to talk about suicide and mental illness is not always easy. People may not wish to talk about feelings of depression. Deaths by suicide are not always publicly identified as such by families, or identified in the same way that deaths from cancer or heart disease might be described.
Instead, it could perhaps be a "hunting accident." Or maybe a person's death would be described as occurring "suddenly, at home." Or maybe it was only whispered about — or not talked about at all.
Friends and teammates of Daron Richardson wore purple and sold bracelets to raise money for the Do it For Daron campaign at their high school on Feb. 8, 2011. (CBC) Get In Touch For Hutch joins initiatives such as D.I.F.D (Do It For Daron), a foundation created after the 2010 suicide of Daron Richardson, the 14-year-old daughter of former Ottawa Senators assistant coach Luke Richardson and his wife Stephanie, in taking a more open, public approach.
And they're being driven in large part by the young people who were immediately touched by their deaths.
"To be honest, I think the initiative started with the youth and … our goal was to support that in any possible way," says Stephanie Richardson.
"When we had young people ask us, 'Would you be upset if we made helmet stickers, would you be upset if we made bracelets,' our answer was always no."
D.I.F.D. aims to increase awareness and get people talking about youth mental health, and works with the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre towards those goals. Richardson says the achievements of the initiative have been remarkable.
"I think for Luke and I, as time went on … we were determined … that this wasn't going to be ignored. Our goal was that those conversations would happen in every home, in every school, in every hockey rink and in the community at large.
"And then you saw big people step up, like the Ottawa Sens Foundation, and say we're open to this conversation, we're going to have a night."
Otttawa-area youth take part in an event in May 2011 to raise awareness about youth mental health. The youth sat in the buses to represent the three busloads of Ontario children and youth that would kill themselves that year. (Courtesy Royal Ottawa Mental Health Group) The Richardsons, who now live in Binghamton, N.Y., where Luke is head coach of the Binghamton Senators, were back in Ottawa this week and received honorary degrees from Algonquin College.
Stephanie has taken part in various public events and was on hand in Ottawa in April when Olympian Clara Hughes announced she will do a cross-country bike ride to talk to people about mental health.
"It's pretty powerful to see people get behind it, but it's more just to create that dialogue and it became … the need for the kids to speak and use their voice and they kept doing it and I would say that it was more everybody following that lead," says Stephanie.
For Hutchison, there is the hope that the message resonating from today's event in Arthur will get people thinking differently about mental illness.
"I think we have to find opportunities in everything we're involved in. For example … I think back about my boys going to hundreds of different arenas across Ontario and never once seeing a poster or banner about mental health support or Kids Help Phone or the crisis line," she says.
"I haven't followed up with Brock, but I wonder about even something as simple as having a magnet or a sticker in that dorm room that had the crisis line on it — if Steven had seen that, would he have taken a second thought to make a call rather than end his life the way he did?"
Both Richardson and Hutchison have seen another phenomenon emerge: because people know of their family's experiences, they approach them with stories of how suicide has touched their families.
Stephanie Richardson, wife of former Ottawa Senators assistant coach Luke Richardson, is pictured at the Scotiabank Place during the IIHF Women's World Hockey Championships in Ottawa on April 3, 2013. The Richardsons' foundation Do It For Daron was the official charity of this year's WWHC. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press) "The biggest showing of support for me has been that people have started talking. People are feeling OK to get in touch with me to share their personal stories," says Hutchison.
"I know stories, two in specific, that have been shared with me just recently in that people have experienced losses through suicide 20 years or so ago and just now are having their first conversations about that."
Richardson says "what is happening is overwhelming." At Algonquin this week, students stopped on stage to thank her and her husband and tell stories of themselves or others they know seeking help.
"Because of the conversations and because of the openness of our daughter's death, there has been major change and it's not because of us. It's because each person sees [themselves] in it and they're comfortable" telling their stories.
Richardson would like to see discussions of mental health issues become mainstream in the education system, and that there be no different value placed on any death, whether it is by cancer, heart disease or suicide.
"I don't understand why the value is different…. That really does not make sense to me, but it seems … some people feel like there's a shame with it, that there's a lesser value of that person. That makes absolutely no sense to me."
Ultimately, for the Richardsons, going public about their daughter's death wasn't necessarily a choice.
"I think it just came with part of our life, with the career that my husband had," says Stephanie Richardson.
"It's a mixed blessing, but we are also very blessed that we do have therapy and we believe in it and that is very, very helpful to have medical help for ourselves."
One thing, she says, though, is that being public about suicide doesn't "take away our despair, our loss or the endless unanswered questions."
Luke Richardson, left, and Dr. Raj Bhatla, chief of psychiatry at Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, speak on the issue of teen suicide in Ottawa on Feb. 24, 2011. (Sean kilpatrick/Canadian Press) "Being public didn't help that. It didn't make it any easier. It didn't make it any worse but it doesn't make it easier. I certainly wouldn't want someone to think if they were public that it eases that sense of despair, loss and desperation to want to answer all those unanswered questions."
Dr. Raj Bhatla, chief of psychiatry of the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, says there are a variety of ways families might cope with the suicide of a child. They need to be able to make the choices that suit them best, he says.
"It's really a private choice of the family. It's neither good nor bad to go public," Bhatla says.
"There shouldn't be a value judgment — go forward publicly or you don't go forward publicly. It's really for each individual family to make that choice. The losses remain."
The belief that foot pronation, or rolling inward of the ankles, increases the risk of injury in novice runners and requires correction with special shoes is being challenged by biomechanics experts.
Running shoe sales pitches tailor shoes to people based on providing "stability" shoes that offer support to the feet of people who "pronate," tipping the ankle toward the inside of the step.
"What you can see if you don't have the right shoe, if you will, is down the road is some injuries that can plague folks that are pronators, which is the vast majority of us," said Bryan Smith, a manager at Running Room in Toronto.
The sales strategy has been used for 30 years. An estimated 73 per cent of cross-country runners say compatibility between foot posture and shoe design is the key factor when choosing a running shoe, Danish researchers reported in a recent issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
"I wear only one kind of shoe, and that's the shoe that I found works for me," said Toronto runner Ginny Wilkins, who has a bad back.
Sten Rasmussen of the Orthopedic Surgery Research Unity at Aalborg University Hospital in Denmark and his team followed 927 novice runners for a year after evaluating participants' foot posture and grouping them by degree of pronation.
"Pronators had a significantly lower [number] of injuries per 1,000/km of running than neutrals," the researchers concluded.
"The results contradict the widespread belief that foot pronation is associated with an increased risk of running-related injury."
Biomechanics professor Benno Nigg at the University of Calgary also studies pronation in running, which he said is a normal movement of the foot.
"The only thing that we found that had a significant and substantial effect in reducing injuries was comfort," Nigg said.
The Danish researchers also suggested comfort may be a "more relevant criterion for healthy persons on which to base their choice of a running shoe."
To judge a comfort fit, experts suggest taking new running shoes out for a road test.
Training characteristics are also considered important to prevent injuries, the Danish team said.
In the study, the researchers acknowledged that the recovery period after injury to one leg was not fully accounted for when analyzing distances for the other leg.
They said it's also possible that foot pronation may be associated with increased risk of running-related injury if other methods are used to assess pronation.
The study was funded by Aarhus University and the Danish Rheumatism Association.
With files from CBC's Kim BrunhuberCanadian doctors who work shifts of up to 26 hours during their residency training can become so fatigued their performance is inhibited, according to a new report.
The report by the National Steering Committee on Resident Duty Hours said there's no conclusive data that restricting residents' consecutive hours on shift is needed for patient safety, but that all residency education should be required to develop programs to manage fatigue.
More effective call schedules for residents in hospitals could help with fatigue issues, says a report (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press) "Fatigue is more than how many hours are worked. It's also the type of work being done, the intensity of workload and many other factors," said Dr. Kevin Imrie, the committee's co-chair and physician-in-chief at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.
"We need to better manage fatigue, create more effective call schedules and do a better job of designing our training programs in order to create positive, lasting change," he added in a news release today.
The report's authors said the status quo for residents' working hours is not acceptable. Being on duty for 24 or more consecutive hours without "restorative sleep" should be avoided and only occur under rare and exceptional circumstances. Many U.S. and European hospitals place such limits.
Studies suggest lack of sleep inhibits performance and, for example, can increase the risk of needle stick accidents in hospitals.
The committee pointed to ongoing negotiations and legal implications of recent labour arbitration rulings in two provinces.
In 2011, a labour arbitration ruling in Quebec determined residents can't work more than 16 hours consecutively on call. (Regulations on total number of hours per week weren't stipulated.) Since then, the authors said that concerns have been raised about frequently alternating between day and night shifts and frequent handovers during patient care, which may increase the potential for miscommunication and medical errors.
In March, an arbitration ruling in Nova Scotia awarded annual wage increases to medical residents in the Maritimes. The committee said as changes are made to residents' education and schedules, national data could help in evaluating the impacts and comparing jurisdictions.
The report's authors included members who accredit residency programs and participants, including the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and the College of Family Physicians of Canada.
The Quebec Medical Association said Thursday it agreed with the conclusions of the report.
"The restriction on resident duty hours obliges us to rethink our ways of doing things. It is our system as a whole that has a workload problem," QMA president Dr. Laurent Marcoux said in a statement.
A father who has been enduring the dread of watching his child die of cancer has lashed back at what he calls an insensitive bureaucracy that continues to leave parking tickets on his car outside a St. John's hospital.
"Having a child in this situation is a mix of sadness, of anger, of just frustration," said Robert Thornhill, whose three-year-old daughter, Erica, suffers from acute myeloid leukemia, and is being treated at the Janeway children's hospital.
Thornhill — who has shared around-the-clock shifts with his wife since last August as their daughter was treated in St. John's and Toronto — said he has asked for consideration from officials who issue parking tickets outside the Health Sciences Centre.
Robert Thornhill shared this photograph on Facebook, depicting a sign he had left for parking officers to read outside the Health Sciences Centre. (CBC) Earlier this week, after seeing the latest parking ticket on his windshield, Thornhill — who lives in Carbonear, but has been home for only a few hours at a time since last summer — decided he had enough.
He wrote a letter for the security officers to see, put it in his car window, and posted a photograph of it on Facebook. It was shared rapidly by at least 2,000 others, many of them strangers.
"My child is upstairs dying of cancer and all you have to do is write me parking tickets. You must feel some good about yourself," Thornhill wrote in the note.
"I was just angry [and] frustrated. Really frustrated," Thornhill told CBC News on Thursday.
"It's not fair that people should have to deal with this, on top of losing a child."
Eastern Health has made changes in its parking system at the Health Sciences Centre over the past two years, largely to help patients who had to rush out to feed meters.
But Thornhill said the system still doesn't work for people with family members receiving care. He added he'd been given a placard to put in his car, but it only prevented tickets from being left on nights and weekends. Tickets are not issued at those times.
In an interview with CBC News, Eastern Health CEO Vickie Kaminski said she couldn't speak on a specific case, but did say there are options available for people with parking issues.
"I empathize with any family in that situation," said Kaminski.
"In cases where the family is from out of town and they have a child who is sick, they can park free of charge at Ronald McDonald House. You pay nothing … it's a very quick walk to the Janeway. So that's one option that we always present."
Kaminski added that if that option isn't acceptable, Eastern Health can provide access to the parking lot by giving families a gated pass.
"But there is one thing we can't do, because we have no ability to make free, are the meters right at the very entrance into the Janeway. Those are kept there for a very quick turnaround … those meters work perfectly for that, and it's about the only spot that's not available for consideration."
Thornhill's daughter underwent three rounds of chemotherapy in St. John's, followed by an even more intensive round of treatment at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto.
However, the Thornhills learned last month that their daughter's cancer had returned, and were told earlier this month that there is no chance Erica will survive the disease.
"It's a parent's worst nightmare," he said.
"It's [the fines] not important," he said. "It's just something that adds stress."
He added few people appreciate how gruelling daily life is for parents dealing with a child with life-threatening illness.
"For most people, it's not a prolonged experience, and for most people, it's not the ending that we see," he said. "The ending is death. That's what it is — it's death. That's what we face."
Britain is planning to become the first country in the world to offer controversial "three-parent" fertility treatments to families who want to avoid passing on incurable diseases to their children.
The methods, currently only at the research stage in laboratories in Britain and the United States, would for the first time involve implanting genetically modified embryos into women.
Critics said the technique was ethically suspect and would eventually lead to a eugenic "designer baby" market.
'It's only right that we look to introduce this life-saving treatment as soon as we can.'—U.K. Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies
It involves intervening in the fertilization process to remove faulty mitochondrial DNA, which can cause inherited conditions such as fatal heart problems, liver failure, brain disorders, blindness and muscular dystrophy.
The methods are designed to help families with mitochondrial diseases — incurable conditions passed down the maternal line that affect around one in 6,500 children worldwide. Mitochondria act as tiny energy-generating batteries inside cells.
The potential treatment is known as three-parent in-vitro fertilization (IVF) because the offspring would have genes from a mother, a father and from a female donor.
After a national public consultation showed Britons broadly favour the idea, the government's chief physician said on Friday it should be allowed to go ahead under strict regulation.
"Scientists have developed ground-breaking new procedures which could stop these diseases being passed on, bringing hope to many families seeking to prevent their children inheriting them," Sally Davies, chief medical officer, told reporters.
"It's only right that we look to introduce this life-saving treatment as soon as we can."
But David King, director of the Human Genetics Alert campaign group said "the techniques are unnecessary and their use is ethically unsound" and criticized the government for failing to conduct a more comprehensive public consultation.
"They cross the ethical line that has been agreed by government around the world that we should not genetically alter human beings," he said in an emailed statement.
Davies said the government's health department is drafting regulations to cover the new treatments and plans to publish them later this year. The move would make Britain the first country in the world to give patients an option of mitochondrial DNA transfer to avoid passing the diseases on to their children.
Scientists are researching several three-parent IVF techniques.
One being developed at Britain's Newcastle University, known as pronuclear transfer, swaps DNA between two fertilized human eggs. Another, called maternal spindle transfer, swaps material between the mother's egg and a donor egg before fertilization.
Pro-life campaigners have already criticized the scientific research, saying that creating embryonic children in a lab abuses them by subjecting them to unnatural processes.
Critics like King also worry that modifying embryos to avoid disease is the first step towards the creation of "designer babies", whose genetic makeup could be modified as embryos to ensure certain traits such as height or hair colour.
Asked whether she was "comfortable" with taking such a major step along the way to allowing human genetic modification, Davies said she had debated and considered the ethical implications with many experts over many years and had come to the conclusion the techniques should be allowed.
Any final decision on putting the regulations in place to allow the new treatments to be offered will be subject to a vote in parliament, but Davies said she hoped the first patients may be able to get the new treatments within two years.
Under Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Act, it's banned to knowingly "alter the genome of a cell of a human being or in vitro embryo such that the alteration is capable of being transmitted to descendants."
Tim Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in Health Law & Policy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, said the U.K. move shows how anachronistic the law is in this country. To Caulfield, if the technique is shown to be safe and effective then it seems ethically appropriate.
"While it is unclear how the law would be interpreted, some may believe the technique infringes several of our bans," Caulfield said in an email.
With files from CBC NewsIt's official: The U.S. National Institutes of Health plans to end most use of chimpanzees in government medical research, saying humans' closest relatives "deserve special respect."
The NIH announced Wednesday that it will retire about 310 government-owned chimpanzees from research over the next few years, and keep only 50 others essentially on retainer — available if needed for crucial medical studies that could be performed no other way.
Two chimps walking together at Chimp Haven in Keithville, La. It's unclear where the retiring chimps, which have spent their lives in research facilities around the U.S., will spend their final years. (Gerald Herbert/Associated Press) "These amazing animals have taught us a great deal already," said NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins. He said the decision helps usher in "a compassionate era."
The NIH's decision was long expected, after the prestigious Institute of Medicine declared in 2011 that nearly all use of chimps for invasive medical research no longer can be justified. Much of the rest of the world already had ended such research with this species that is so like us.
Any future biomedical research funded by the NIH with chimps, government-owned or not, would be allowed only under strict conditions after review by a special advisory board. In five years, the NIH will reassess if even that group of 50 government-owned apes still is needed for science.
"This is an historic moment and major turning point for chimpanzees in laboratories, some who have been languishing in concrete housing for over 50 years," said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States. "It is crucial now to ensure that the release of hundreds of chimpanzees to sanctuary becomes a reality."
What's unclear is exactly where the retiring chimps, which have spent their lives in research facilities around the country, now will spend their final years. NIH said they could eventually join more than 150 other chimps already in the national sanctuary system operated by Chimp Haven in northwest Louisiana. In that habitat, the chimps can socialize at will, climb trees and explore different play areas.
But NIH officials said currently there's not enough space to handle all of the 310 destined for retirement. They're exploring additional locations, and noted that some research facilities that currently house government-owned chimps have habitats similar to the sanctuary system.
The other hurdle is money: Congress limited how much the NIH can spend on caring for chimps in the sanctuary system. Negotiations are under way to shift money the agency has spent housing the animals in research facilities toward supporting their retirement.
"Everybody should understand this is not something that is going to happen quickly," Collins cautioned.
One chimp centre, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, said keeping just 50 of the animals for ongoing research isn't enough and could hamper efforts to fight not just human illnesses but diseases that kill apes, too.
Moreover, moving retired chimpanzees to the federal sanctuary "would take them away from their caregivers, many of whom they have known all of their lives," said an institute statement that argued the animals would fare better if they stayed put.
The NIH's decision came two weeks after the Fish and Wildlife Service called for protection of all chimpanzees as endangered. Until now there was a "split listing" that labeled wild chimps as endangered but those in captivity as threatened, a status that offers less protection.
That move also would affect any future use of chimps in medical research, and NIH said it would work with its government counterpart to ensure compliance.
Chimps rarely have been used for drug testing or other invasive research in recent years; studies of chimp behaviour or genetics are a bit more common. Of nine biomedical projects under way, the NIH said six would be ended early. Of another 13 behavioural or genetic studies involving chimps, five would be ended early. NIH would not identify the projects, but Collins said potential future need for chimps could be in creating a vaccine against hepatitis C.
Until now, one in every four lungs offered to University of Alberta's Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute centre has been accepted, but more lungs will be available to patients who need them with the addition of Canada's first portable Ex-Vivo lung perfusion device.
"We are geographically the most isolated cardio-thoracic transplant surgery location in the world," said Dr. Jayan Nagrendan, a surgeon at the institute.
The device, which looks like a bar fridge on wheels, infuses lungs with continuous flows of oxygen and warm blood, which strengthens and repairs lungs before surgery.
"What it changes is that if we use this machine twice a month, we would eliminate the 25 people dying every year waiting for lung transplantation," said Nagrendan.
"We would decrease the time patients are waiting for lung transplantation, which is well over a year right now."
The doctor used the machine in April to travel out of province to pick up a pair of lungs that were so damaged, they had been rejected by every other transplant program.
The recipient's surgery was a complete success.
B.C.'s Health Ministry must improve privacy controls following three massive data breaches involving the personal records of millions of British Columbians, a report from the province's privacy commissioner concludes.
The privacy breaches came to light last year when then-health minster Margaret McDiarmid revealed seven ministry employees had been fired or suspended for allegedly passing the personal health records of millions of British Columbians to contracted researchers on unencrypted computer memory sticks and flash drives.
After the breaches were discovered, seven Health Ministry employees were fired or suspended for the alleged misuse of personal health-care data. At least one of those employees launched a lawsuit against the government.
In her report on the breaches released on Wednesday morning, B.C. Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham found "serious deficiencies" in the Health Ministry's privacy practices and a lack of reasonable security.
'Ministry employees were able to copy a large volume of personal health data onto unencrypted flash drives and share that data ... undetected.'—Elizabeth Denham, B.C. privacy commissioner
"The lack of operational and technical safeguards led to a situation in which ministry employees were able to copy a large volume of personal health data onto unencrypted flash drives and share that data with other parties, undetected," said a statement issued by Denham.
The investigation found that at the time the breaches happened, the ministry didn't have reasonable security in place to protect personal information as required by Section 30 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
However, the ministry's response to the data breaches, once discovered, did comply with the act, Denham noted.
The commissioner made 11 recommendations to improve the ministry's privacy practice and promised to follow up with the ministry to ensure the recommendations were addressed.
"Privacy and research are allies, not adversaries, in the pursuit of better health outcomes," said Denham.
The investigation into the privacy breaches was launched in March 2012, after the auditor general received a tip that employees at the Pharmaceutical Services Division of the ministry were allegedly accessing and disclosing personal health records.
In September, the Health Ministry investigation concluded an employee had provided a contracted service provider with unauthorized access to the personal health records.
The data included the health numbers of four million B.C. residents, the number of mental health service encounters they had, whether the person had diabetes, the number of hospital stays and all the services billed for that person.
The report found the contractor had asked for the personal health numbers to be deleted from the data, but the employee who provided the information failed to do that.
Further investigations by the Health Ministry and the commissioner revealed two other similar incidents.
In the second instance, an employee provided an external researcher with the health numbers, age, and chronic disease registries of about 20,000 people.
In the third instance, another Health Ministry employee gave data collected under the Canadian Community Health Survey by Statistics Canada, including MSP billing records, hospital discharge summaries, PharmaCare prescriptions and other information to another Health Ministry employee, who wasn't authorized to receive it.
The commissioner noted unencrypted portable data storage devices were used in all three instances to transfer the data.
The report made 11 recommendations to improve the security of health-care databases, including tighter rules on the use of portable data storage devices, conducting an inventory of all databases and tightening access to them, and clarifying data access in contracts with external researchers.
The report noted the Health Ministry had already undertaken several actions, including launching an inventory of databases and who has access to them, putting more databases inside existing systems designed to protect privacy and increase security, closer monitoring of the release of data to contracted researchers, increasing the monitoring and training of employees and establishing a chief privacy officer within the ministry
Following the report's release, Health Minister Terry Lake said all of the recommendations would be implemented.
"As minister of health, I take the responsibility to safeguard British Columbians' personal health information very seriously. The ministry will be accepting and implementing all of the commissioner's 11 recommendations," he said.
Lake also said that the ministry had hired a private auditor to conduct a review of the ministry's practices.
"Late last year, we engaged the firm Deloitte to do a review of ministry data security practices. Much of what the commissioner suggests matches the 10 recommendations from Deloitte's review. We also have accepted Deloitte's recommendations in full, and have already acted on a number of them."
B.C. privacy commissioner's report on the Ministry of Health (PDF)
B.C. privacy commissioner's report on the Ministry of Health (Text)
The belief that foot pronation, or rolling inward of the ankles, increases the risk of injury in novice runners and requires correction with special shoes is being challenged by biomechanics experts.
Running shoe sales pitches tailor shoes to people based on providing "stability" shoes that offer support to the feet of people who "pronate," tipping the ankle toward the inside of the step.
Comfort rather than measures of pronation could be the key to reducing running injuries for people taking up running. (Darren Calabrese/Canadian Press) "What you can see if you don't have the right shoe, if you will, is down the road is some injuries that can plague folks that are pronators, which is the vast majority of us," said Bryan Smith, a manager at Running Room in Toronto.
The sales strategy has been used for 30 years. An estimated 73 per cent of cross-country runners say compatibility between foot posture and shoe design is the key factor when choosing a running shoe, Danish researchers reported in a recent issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
"I wear only one kind of shoe, and that's the shoe that I found works for me," said Toronto runner Ginny Wilkins, who has a bad back.
Sten Rasmussen of the Orthopedic Surgery Research Unity at Aalborg University Hospital in Denmark and his team followed 927 novice runners for a year after evaluating participants' foot posture and grouping them by degree of pronation.
"Pronators had a significantly lower [number] of injuries per 1,000/km of running than neutrals," the researchers concluded.
"The results contradict the widespread belief that foot pronation is associated with an increased risk of running-related injury."
Biomechanics professor Benno Nigg at the University of Calgary also studies pronation in running, which he said is a normal movement of the foot.
"The only thing that we found that had a significant and substantial effect in reducing injuries was comfort," Nigg said.
The Danish researchers also suggested comfort may be a "more relevant criterion for healthy persons on which to base their choice of a running shoe."
To judge a comfort fit, experts suggest taking new running shoes out for a road test.
Training characteristics are also considered important to prevent injuries, the Danish team said.
In the study, the researchers acknowledged that the recovery period after injury to one leg was not fully accounted for when analyzing distances for the other leg.
They said it's also possible that foot pronation may be associated with increased risk of running-related injury if other methods are used to assess pronation.
The study was funded by Aarhus University and the Danish Rheumatism Association.
With files from CBC's Kim BrunhuberThe personal information of about 16,000 patients of a medical lab service in Kamloops has gone missing, says the company's president.
LifeLabs president Sue Paish said Monday a computer was sent to their main office in Burnaby for servicing in January, but when it was returned, the hard drive was missing.
The hard drive held the results of ECGs, or electrocardiograms, gathered at three local facilities between 2007 and 2013.
"There was no financial information whatsoever included in the data, no ability to access any financial records or other financial-related data," said Paish, who admitted the drive did include personal information like the patient's name, address, height, age, gender, the ECG results and health care number.
She said an internal investigation failed to determine who took the drive and where it is now, adding the information is password protected and requires special equipment to read.
The company has implemented measures to minimize the risk of such incidents in the future, including ensuring that all ECG reports and drives are fully encrypted, said Paish.
She also apologized for the incident and said this is the first security breach in the Lifelabs' 50-year history.
Health Minister Terry Lake said he learned of the breach just last week.
"It's unacceptable to take this amount of time to notify the government and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner about a breach like this," he said. "And again they have assured us that will not happen in the future."
Lifelabs has set up a phone line and online contact information for anyone who thinks their information might have been breached:
The prevalence of traumatic brain injuries such as concussions among students points to a silent epidemic that demands a wake-up call from parents, coaches and other adults, Canadian neurosurgeons and psychologists say.
One in five students in grades 7 to 12 said they'd had a traumatic brain injury that left them unconscious for at least five minutes or required a hospital stay overnight after symptoms, researchers said in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Teen mood swings after losing consciousness from a brain injury need to be taken seriously, says psychologist Gabriela Ilie. (Jill English/CBC) The researchers from St. Michael's Hospital and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto surveyed 8,915 students across Ontario in 2011 as part of one of the longest ongoing school surveys in the world.
"It needs to be a wake-up call to say, look, young people are sustaining brain injuries at a very high rate," said the study's lead author, Dr. Michael Cusimano, a neurosurgeon at St. Michael's Hospital. "If we want to protect future generations, because our brain really defines how we are … not just as an individual, we need to do something collectively as a society to address this problem."
Of the 464 students reporting a traumatic brain injury in the past 12 months, sports injuries accounted for more than half of the cases, 56 per cent, particularly for boys. Concussions that didn't lead to loss of consciousness or a hospital stay weren't included.
"We need to increase our efforts around sport so that kids get the benefit of sports but don't suffer these negative consequences," Cusimano said. "We know that we still have a significant problem with hits to the head, hits from behind and fighting," in youth hockey.
Sports injuries were the reported cause given by 63 per cent of boys and 47 per cent of girls.
Students were also asked about their use of alcohol and cannabis, as well as their grades.
"Kids who use alcohol regularly have three times the odds of reporting the brain injury than those who don't, and those who use cannabis are five times more likely to report the brain injury," Cusimano said.
Students reporting poor grades were around four times more likely to say they'd had a brain injury. The findings were the same across the province and likely hold across Canada and in the U.S, the team said.
The brain injuries could be the result of falling when drunk or an injury from a fight, associations the researchers plan to delve into further as the survey continues.
For those who reported a brain injury in the past year:
"Teens go through so many ups and downs, mood swings," said co-author Gabriela Ilie, a psychologist at the hospital.
"So it's so hard to really pin it down and make up your mind as to you know is there something going on with my son or my daughter? That's why it's important that they see a doctor, especially when it's something as serious as losing consciousness for five minutes."
Emma Fricker, 17, of Mississauga, suffered two concussions, one from downhill ski racing at age 12 and another playing soccer two years ago.
"The first one was pretty life-changing, since I had been unconscious, I was pretty rattled when I woke up and shaken and I didn't really know what was going on I wasn't really myself for two months, my mood swings were outrageous. They were crying and then smiling and laughing and then beyond frustrated and yelling and I had never been a moody kid before," Fricker recalled.
"The dizziness and the headaches really affected me at school. I couldn't focus for more than a half an hour. It was a ride."
Fricker still skis but has given up soccer.
With files from CBC's Melanie Glanz and Jill EnglishAn Edmonton-based doctor is helping save lives in Syria, from thousands of kilometres away. "If they need my help, I'm available," says Dr. Maher Saqqur, a critical care neurologist with Alberta Health Services.
CBC's Ioanna Roumeliotis talks to Saqqur about how he helps patients from afar via the internet.
Waterloo Region doesn't have enough trained caregivers to help with the soaring demand for dementia care, according to the Alzheimer Society of Kitchener-Waterloo.
There's been a 50 per cent increase in demand for the Society's services and it says the referral rate increased 100 per cent from 2009 to 2012.
Not only is demand increasing, but caring for people with dementia is much more involved, says Charlotte Sider, the public education coordinator for the Alzheimer Society of Kitchener-Waterloo.
"People with dementia really require consistent and stable assistance. It can't just be a different person every day, because of their confusion," said Sider.
"You can imagine, for a person already confused, and then they don't even have the consistency of a stable person in their life who's supporting them."
The system has struggled to care for Michelle Steane's father David, who was diagnosed with frontal temporal dementia -- a type of early onset dementia -- at age 53.
Michelle Steane's father, David, was diagnosed with early onset dementia at 53. Since then he has been transferred between Waterloo Region's mental health units and nursing homes, with no place appropriate for his unique needs. (Matt Kang/CBC) He can't stay at home, but doesn't belong in a hospital mental health ward or traditional long term care, either.
"He liked to run in the hallways and he was just a lot more physically fit and faster than the other patients," said Steane.
"If you brush up against an old lady, there's a possiblity of maybe breaking a hip, breaking an arm or just hurting them in the slightest bit, it's not really an option."
Her father has been bumped from hospital to nursing home and back again since October 2010, and is now at Grand River Hospital's Seniors Mental Health Unit until they can find a more suitable place for him to stay.
"The problem is the facilities just aren't there and they can't work with what doesn't exist," said Steane.
"I don't place any blame on [the CCAC] at all. They are doing the best that they can with what they have, working to meet his needs but it's really a matter of there aren't a wide enough variety of services in the region. And considering that the baby boomer population is reaching the point where these types of diseases start to show the wait lists are just going to get longer and longer."
The number of people living with dementia in the Waterloo-Wellington Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) was 9,784 in 2012 – and Charlotte Sider said that's on the rise.
In fact, she said the number of people living with dementia locally is projected to grow by 28 per cent between 2008 and 2016.
Sider says lately, the province has put a lot of emphasis on person-centred care, and that's a good sign, but agencies will need more money to make that vision a reality.
"If the system is pretty taxed and stretched right now, it's just like an elastic. You know, eventually, that elastic will not be able to withstand the forces on it and it will break. In a sense, that's the issue right now. We're already taxed with the number of people presenting themselves," said Sider.
About a quarter of families in which someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's or other dementias in Waterloo Region get care from the Alzheimer's Society of Kitchener Waterloo.
With files from the CBC's Jackie Sharkey and Matthew KangDeath rates among people with Type 2 diabetes have fallen sharply in Canada and the United Kingdom since the mid-1990s, researchers say.
The excess mortality risk among those with diabetes compared with those without the condition decreased over time in both Canada and the U.K., Dr. Lorraine Lipscombe, an endocrinologist at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, said in Thursday's issue of Diabetologia, the Journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.
Nearly 2.4 million Canadians were living with diagnosed diabetes in 2008-09, according to federal statistics. (Steve Yeater/Associated Press) The excess risk of mortality estimated during 2009 was 51 per cent in Ontario compared with 90 per cent in 1996.
"The hypothesis is that the mortality rates for diabetes have gone down in part because we're taking better care of our diabetes patients," Lipscombe said.
The risk declined by a similar degree for men and women over the study period.
In 2008-09, nearly 2.4 million Canadians aged one year and older were living with diagnosed diabetes, either Type 1 or Type 2, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
The researchers cautioned it's possible there are now more newly diagnosed patients who have had diabetes for a shorter period, since recent guidelines focus on screening high-risk groups.
In the last 10 years, guidelines have stressed aggressive control of blood pressure, cholesterol and hyperglycemia in people with diabetes, so patients may now be receiving more intensive care.
The prevalence of diabetes was higher in Ontario than in the U.K., where the risk fell to 65 per cent in 2009 compared with 114 per cent in 1996.
It's not clear why, but factors such as screening programs, ethnicity, eating habits or physical activity patterns could be contributing, the researchers speculated. Ontario's population was also relatively constant over time while the U.K. group increased.
Factors that influence death rates, such as cardiovascular disease and smoking, were not explored. Lipscombe hopes to check if there is a similar trend for cardiovascular disease in the province.
The study was funded by Ontario's Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and an unrestricted grant from AstraZeneca and Novo Dordisk Scandinavia.
With files from CBC's Kas Roussy
NeoMagnetic Cube metallic glazed spheres are one of the recalled products. (Health Canada) Health Canada has ordered a toy maker to pull dangerous magnet sets off store shelves.
Distributor NeoMagnetic Gadgets Inc. of Montreal was ordered to issue a recall and stop sale after the company failed to take voluntary action to remove the novelty magnet sets from sale, Health Canada said Friday, noting the company has complied.
After Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq told industry that the government would act to remove dangerous magnet sets from the marketplace in April, the department issued advisories to warn of the dangers in May.
In March, pediatricians writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal warned that life-threatening problems can result if a child swallows small, high-powered magnets that are stronger than traditional magnets.
"Unlike other small objects that would be more likely to pass normally through the digestive system if swallowed, when more than one small powerful magnet is swallowed, the magnets can attract one another while travelling through the digestive system," Health Canada said.
"The magnets can then pinch together and create a blockage and slowly tear through the intestinal walls, causing perforations."
The full recall list is on healthycanadians.gc.ca.
Consumers should stop using the recalled magnet sets immediately and contact their municipality for instructions on how to dispose of or recycle the products, the department said.
About 4,000 of the products were sold in Canada between February 2010 and this month.
Under Canada's Consumer Product Safety Act, recalled products can't be redistributed, sold or given away.
Women who take daily prenatal iron supplements may reduce the risk of anemia and low birth weight, a review concludes.
Iron deficiency is the most widespread nutritional deficiency globally, according to the World Health Organization. The agency has long recommended iron supplements in developing countries and prenatal nutrition guidelines in Canada, U.S. and UK do as well.
The problem of serious iron deficiency tends to affect low-income countries. (Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters) To see how taking prenatal iron affects babies, researchers from U.S. and UK analyzed the results of more than 90 randomized trials and studies on prenatal iron use involving nearly two million women.
"Our findings suggest that the use of iron in women during pregnancy may be used as a preventive strategy" to improve maternal blood status and birth weight, Batool Haider of the departments of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and her co-authors concluded in Friday's issue of BMJ.
For example, for every 10 gram per litre increase in average hemoglobin concentration in the third trimester or at delivery, birth weight increased by 143 grams.
How long the iron was taken didn't make a difference after considering dose.
The researchers suggested exploring other feasible strategies for giving iron, such as comparing fortification and broadening dietary sources.
In general, Health Canada recommends taking a daily multivitamin that has 16 to 20 milligrams of iron to help have a healthy pregnancy.
The problem of serious iron deficiency tends to affect low-income countries, where some women may already have poor health status before pregnancy and may not be able to afford iron supplements, the UK's Royal College of Midwives noted in a comment on the research.
Using iron to increase birth weight could boost survival of newborns in the low range, the researchers said. They pointed to animal studies suggesting that the placenta may regulate transfer of iron and proteins.
Earlier this month, researchers in Australia said that taking iron tablets once a day offered no benefits in birth weight or better infant growth over taking the supplements just twice a week, based on a randomized control trial in rural Vietnam. That study was published in PLOS Medicine.
Contrary to some reports, most Canadian university students tell researchers they are happy with their sex lives. And for the majority, their most recent sexual partner was someone with whom they are in a committed relationship, according to the results of a recent survey.
When it comes to birth control, the students use a "surprisingly narrow" range of contraceptive methods.
These findings appear in a forthcoming sexual health study done by Trojan and the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN). Trojan, the condom brand manufactured by Church and Dwight Co., funded the survey and the Toronto-based SIECCAN developed and designed the academic study.
Leger Marketing conducted the multi-faceted online survey of university students – the sample size is 1,500 – aged 18 to 24 years. The survey piggybacked on a regular marketing survey they did for Trojan in December.
Alex McKay, SIECCAN's research coordinator, presented some of the study's findings at the annual Guelph Sexuality Conference at the University of Guelph on June 7.
Asked about their last sex partner, 60 per cent of the men and 70 per cent of the women in the nationally representative sample indicated it was either their spouse, fiancé or an otherwise committed romantic partner.
Thirty per cent of the men and 23 per cent of the women told researchers that the last time they had sex, it was with a casual sex partner.
As the table above shows, when it comes to casual sex, the highest numbers for most recent sexual partner are for a "friend with benefits." That's fitting for Canadian university students, given the homegrown origin of the term – the phrase first appeared in Alanis Morissette's 1995 hit song Head over Feet.
University of Ottawa sex researcher Jocelyn Wentland says young people are clear on the distinctions between different types of casual sex relationships and 'know the appropriate behavior that goes along with it.' (Courtesy @dawzphoto) Young people are clear on the distinctions between the different types of casual sex relationships, sex researcher Jocelyn Wentland tells CBC News.
"They're very, very clear on what these relationship types are, and it doesn't matter whether you have engaged in one or not, you know the definition of it and you know the appropriate behavior that goes along with it."
Wentland is working on her PhD at the University of Ottawa's experimental psychology program. Her paper, "Talking casual sex not too casually: exploring definitions of casual sexual relationships," was published in 2011 in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality.
The survey also asked the students about their current relationship status. Just over half the men and 40 per cent of the women said they were not dating, 13 per cent of both men and women were dating casually and 34 per cent of the men and 46 per cent of women were in a committed dating relationship, engaged, married or living together.
The study's findings about Canadian university students are in stark contrast to the American experience described in Donna Freitas' new book, The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.
In May, Freitas told CBC Radio listeners that at American universities, "Mostly, students are ambivalent or they're fairly unhappy.
"And one of the things I thought was really shocking was that when I asked students to talk about their hook-ups, pleasure almost never came up. They didn't talk about pleasure, as if pleasure was not even a part of the bargain."
Asked about their overall happiness with their sex life, 67 per cent of men said they were "happy" or "very happy," as did 80 per cent of the women.
But as McKay told CBC News, "men and women, particularly young men and women, use different criteria to assess their happiness with their sex life."
According to McKay, there's a "greater propensity for males to assess their own happiness simply in terms of the quantity of sex they are having" while a young woman is "more likely to be looking at the quality of her relationship."
Wentland says, "Maybe this is a reflection of women being accepting and pleased that there are various relationship options available to them."
The survey found that 77 per cent of the female students surveyed and 73 per cent of the men say they have had sex, defined as genital, oral or anal.
When Canadian university students use birth control, two methods dominate: condoms and the oral contraceptive pill, according to the forthcoming Trojan/SIECCAN sexual health study. (Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters) The survey also looks at the use of birth control. Two methods dominate: the oral contraceptive pill and the condom. Other methods barely register as a preferred method of contraception.
The pill was the preferred choice of 47 per cent, the condom for 24 per cent and then the intra-uterine device (IUD) at 3 per cent. All other methods were at two per cent or lower. Thirteen per cent said "no method."
After seeing the survey results, McKay said the range of the contraceptive methods used by the Canadian women is "surprisingly narrow."
The Trojan/SIECCAN study looked at the contraceptive method used at last sexual intercourse, broken down by the type of relationship. Here's how the study defines those relationships:
The chart, which shows women's responses, has condoms as the most frequently used method but declining in use as women move into more committed relationships, while other methods have higher usage rates.
McKay says there is often an assumption that a very large chunk of women who use condoms are using them to prevent sexually transmitted diseases (STIs), but most women who do use condoms "see them as an effective and convenient method of birth control."
Wentland, who wrote a paper on attitudes towards condom use, found that "when you ask people why they use a condom, it's pregnancy prevention. That's by far the number one reason and STIs is a very distant second."
McKay notes that not very many women use dual contraception, which is the pill to prevent pregnancy and condoms to prevent STIs.
Overall, McKay says "we find that young people tend to do fairly well in terms of contraception generally." As further evidence of this, he points out that the teen pregnancy rate has declined by a significant amount over the last decades, although leveling off over the last five years, and "that is clearly showing that young people have become better at contraception over time."
The full results of the Trojan/SIECCAN study will be published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality and other academic research journals.
Death rates among people with Type 2 diabetes have fallen sharply in Canada and the United Kingdom since the mid-1990s, researchers say.
The excess mortality risk among those with diabetes compared with those without the condition decreased over time in both Canada and the U.K., Dr. Lorraine Lipscombe, an endocrinologist at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, said in Thursday's issue of Diabetologia, the Journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.
Nearly 2.4 million Canadians were living with diagnosed diabetes in 2008-09, according to federal statistics. (Steve Yeater/Associated Press) The excess risk of mortality estimated during 2009 was 51 per cent in Ontario compared with 90 per cent in 1996.
"The hypothesis is that the mortality rates for diabetes have gone down in part because we're taking better care of our diabetes patients," Lipscombe said.
The risk declined by a similar degree for men and women over the study period.
In 2008-09, nearly 2.4 million Canadians aged one year and older were living with diagnosed diabetes, either Type 1 or Type 2, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
The researchers cautioned it's possible there are now more newly diagnosed patients who have had diabetes for a shorter period, since recent guidelines focus on screening high-risk groups.
In the last 10 years, guidelines have stressed aggressive control of blood pressure, cholesterol and hyperglycemia in people with diabetes, so patients may now be receiving more intensive care.
The prevalence of diabetes was higher in Ontario than in the U.K., where the risk fell to 65 per cent in 2009 compared with 114 per cent in 1996.
It's not clear why, but factors such as screening programs, ethnicity, eating habits or physical activity patterns could be contributing, the researchers speculated. Ontario's population was also relatively constant over time while the U.K. group increased.
Factors that influence death rates, such as cardiovascular disease and smoking, were not explored. Lipscombe hopes to check if there is a similar trend for cardiovascular disease in the province.
The study was funded by Ontario's Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and an unrestricted grant from AstraZeneca and Novo Dordisk Scandinavia.
With files from CBC's Kas RoussyNeoMagnetic Cube metallic glazed spheres are one of the recalled products. (Health Canada) Health Canada has ordered a toy maker to pull dangerous magnet sets off store shelves.
Distributor NeoMagnetic Gadgets Inc. of Montreal was ordered to issue a recall and stop sale after the company failed to take voluntary action to remove the novelty magnet sets from sale, Health Canada said Friday, noting the company has complied.
After Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq told industry that the government would act to remove dangerous magnet sets from the marketplace in April, the department issued advisories to warn of the dangers in May.
In March, pediatricians writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal warned that life-threatening problems can result if a child swallows small, high-powered magnets that are stronger than traditional magnets.
"Unlike other small objects that would be more likely to pass normally through the digestive system if swallowed, when more than one small powerful magnet is swallowed, the magnets can attract one another while travelling through the digestive system," Health Canada said.
"The magnets can then pinch together and create a blockage and slowly tear through the intestinal walls, causing perforations."
The full recall list is on healthycanadians.gc.ca.
Consumers should stop using the recalled magnet sets immediately and contact their municipality for instructions on how to dispose of or recycle the products, the department said.
About 4,000 of the products were sold in Canada between February 2010 and this month.
Under Canada's Consumer Product Safety Act, recalled products can't be redistributed, sold or given away.
Women who take daily prenatal iron supplements may reduce the risk of anemia and low birth weight, a review concludes.
Iron deficiency is the most widespread nutritional deficiency globally, according to the World Health Organization. The agency has long recommended iron supplements in developing countries and prenatal nutrition guidelines in Canada, U.S. and UK do as well.
The problem of serious iron deficiency tends to affect low-income countries. (Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters) To see how taking prenatal iron affects babies, researchers from U.S. and UK analyzed the results of more than 90 randomized trials and studies on prenatal iron use involving nearly two million women.
"Our findings suggest that the use of iron in women during pregnancy may be used as a preventive strategy" to improve maternal blood status and birth weight, Batool Haider of the departments of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and her co-authors concluded in Friday's issue of BMJ.
For example, for every 10 gram per litre increase in average hemoglobin concentration in the third trimester or at delivery, birth weight increased by 143 grams.
How long the iron was taken didn't make a difference after considering dose.
The researchers suggested exploring other feasible strategies for giving iron, such as comparing fortification and broadening dietary sources.
In general, Health Canada recommends taking a daily multivitamin that has 16 to 20 milligrams of iron to help have a healthy pregnancy.
The problem of serious iron deficiency tends to affect low-income countries, where some women may already have poor health status before pregnancy and may not be able to afford iron supplements, the UK's Royal College of Midwives noted in a comment on the research.
Using iron to increase birth weight could boost survival of newborns in the low range, the researchers said. They pointed to animal studies suggesting that the placenta may regulate transfer of iron and proteins.
Earlier this month, researchers in Australia said that taking iron tablets once a day offered no benefits in birth weight or better infant growth over taking the supplements just twice a week, based on a randomized control trial in rural Vietnam. That study was published in PLOS Medicine.
Contrary to some reports, most Canadian university students tell researchers they are happy with their sex lives. And for the majority, their most recent sexual partner was someone with whom they are in a committed relationship, according to the results of a recent survey.
When it comes to birth control, the students use a "surprisingly narrow" range of contraceptive methods.
These findings appear in a forthcoming sexual health study done by Trojan and the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN). Trojan, the condom brand manufactured by Church and Dwight Co., funded the survey and the Toronto-based SIECCAN developed and designed the academic study.
Leger Marketing conducted the multi-faceted online survey of university students – the sample size is 1,500 – aged 18 to 24 years. The survey piggybacked on a regular marketing survey they did for Trojan in December.
Alex McKay, SIECCAN's research coordinator, presented some of the study's findings at the annual Guelph Sexuality Conference at the University of Guelph on June 7.
Asked about their last sex partner, 60 per cent of the men and 70 per cent of the women in the nationally representative sample indicated it was either their spouse, fiancé or an otherwise committed romantic partner.
Thirty per cent of the men and 23 per cent of the women told researchers that the last time they had sex, it was with a casual sex partner.
As the table above shows, when it comes to casual sex, the highest numbers for most recent sexual partner are for a "friend with benefits." That's fitting for Canadian university students, given the homegrown origin of the term – the phrase first appeared in Alanis Morissette's 1995 hit song Head over Feet.
University of Ottawa sex researcher Jocelyn Wentland says young people are clear on the distinctions between different types of casual sex relationships and 'know the appropriate behavior that goes along with it.' (Courtesy @dawzphoto) Young people are clear on the distinctions between the different types of casual sex relationships, sex researcher Jocelyn Wentland tells CBC News.
"They're very, very clear on what these relationship types are, and it doesn't matter whether you have engaged in one or not, you know the definition of it and you know the appropriate behavior that goes along with it."
Wentland is working on her PhD at the University of Ottawa's experimental psychology program. Her paper, "Talking casual sex not too casually: exploring definitions of casual sexual relationships," was published in 2011 in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality.
The survey also asked the students about their current relationship status. Just over half the men and 40 per cent of the women said they were not dating, 13 per cent of both men and women were dating casually and 34 per cent of the men and 46 per cent of women were in a committed dating relationship, engaged, married or living together.
The study's findings about Canadian university students are in stark contrast to the American experience described in Donna Freitas' new book, The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.
In May, Freitas told CBC Radio listeners that at American universities, "Mostly, students are ambivalent or they're fairly unhappy.
"And one of the things I thought was really shocking was that when I asked students to talk about their hook-ups, pleasure almost never came up. They didn't talk about pleasure, as if pleasure was not even a part of the bargain."
Asked about their overall happiness with their sex life, 67 per cent of men said they were "happy" or "very happy," as did 80 per cent of the women.
But as McKay told CBC News, "men and women, particularly young men and women, use different criteria to assess their happiness with their sex life."
According to McKay, there's a "greater propensity for males to assess their own happiness simply in terms of the quantity of sex they are having" while a young woman is "more likely to be looking at the quality of her relationship."
Wentland says, "Maybe this is a reflection of women being accepting and pleased that there are various relationship options available to them."
The survey found that 77 per cent of the female students surveyed and 73 per cent of the men say they have had sex, defined as genital, oral or anal.
When Canadian university students use birth control, two methods dominate: condoms and the oral contraceptive pill, according to the forthcoming Trojan/SIECCAN sexual health study. (Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters) The survey also looks at the use of birth control. Two methods dominate: the oral contraceptive pill and the condom. Other methods barely register as a preferred method of contraception.
The pill was the preferred choice of 47 per cent, the condom for 24 per cent and then the intra-uterine device (IUD) at 3 per cent. All other methods were at two per cent or lower. Thirteen per cent said "no method."
After seeing the survey results, McKay said the range of the contraceptive methods used by the Canadian women is "surprisingly narrow."
The Trojan/SIECCAN study looked at the contraceptive method used at last sexual intercourse, broken down by the type of relationship. Here's how the study defines those relationships:
The chart, which shows women's responses, has condoms as the most frequently used method but declining in use as women move into more committed relationships, while other methods have higher usage rates.
McKay says there is often an assumption that a very large chunk of women who use condoms are using them to prevent sexually transmitted diseases (STIs), but most women who do use condoms "see them as an effective and convenient method of birth control."
Wentland, who wrote a paper on attitudes towards condom use, found that "when you ask people why they use a condom, it's pregnancy prevention. That's by far the number one reason and STIs is a very distant second."
McKay notes that not very many women use dual contraception, which is the pill to prevent pregnancy and condoms to prevent STIs.
Overall, McKay says "we find that young people tend to do fairly well in terms of contraception generally." As further evidence of this, he points out that the teen pregnancy rate has declined by a significant amount over the last decades, although leveling off over the last five years, and "that is clearly showing that young people have become better at contraception over time."
The full results of the Trojan/SIECCAN study will be published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality and other academic research journals.
