A round-up of Canadian health news, from coast to coast to coast and beyond, for Monday, December 22.
Plastic Christmas-gift packaging every year results in hospital admissions for lacerations and puncture wounds on Christmas Day every year. "That clamshell packaging is absolutely diabolical," said Colorado emergency physician David Ross. Another potential packaging-related diagnosis: "wrap rage."
A group of 18 Newfoundland and Labrador specialist physicians has gone public with concerns about the province's inability to retain and recruit medical specialists to the province. The 18 physicians were excluded from wage increases offered recently to certain specialists. "The only way you're going to get more people like us is to ante up a little, unfortunately," Mark Stefanelli, a neurologist, told The Telegram. They want a 35% raise, instead of the 20% they expect to receive.
This flu season is presenting problems for public officials: some flu viruses have been found to be oseltamivir-resistant while others are amantadine- and rimantadine-resistant. None of the common strains appear to be resistant to zanamivir, though that drug is contraindicated in children under seven and some adult patients. For more information on this year's flu virus drug resistance and current trends, see the latest FluWatch from the Public Health Agency of Canada. [PHAC]
Maple Leaf Foods agreed to an out-of-court settlement with patients who had initiated class-action lawsuits against the company after an outbreak of listeriosis killed at least twenty Canadians earlier this year and infected many more. The total amount of the settlement is between $25 million and $27 million, with individual payouts ranging from $750 for a one- or two-day-long illness to more than $200,000 for the families of people who died as a result of their infections. [Toronto Star] Before the 2008 listeriosis scare, 6% of Canadians said they would not eat deli meats; after, that figure jumped to 39%, according to University of Guelph researchers.
Two cases of flesh-eating disease, or necrotizing fasciitis, around the bellybuttons of Alberta infants born a day apart this summer were not connected, an internal review concluded. One of the babies died.
One of the most effective ways to control the spread of HIV in prisons is to provide a needle exchange program and opioid substitution therapy, a Quebec consultant reported in the January 2009 issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The Conservative government last year decided not to follow the advice of the Public Health Agency of Canada to institute a Prison Needle Exchange Program.
Alberta's Ministry of Health and Wellness is projected to run a $1.3 billion deficit over the next year. "They're always the large elephant in the room," said Premier Ed Stelmach of the ministry. "It just seems like every area we deal with, when we take a look at it... quite frankly you could do it another way that makes it more efficient," said Health Minister Ron Liepert of a recent report intended to save money in the province's healthcare system. Mr Liepert's planned reforms got a ringing endorsement from the Calgary Sun's Rick Bell, who declared in his headline, "The only physicians who have to fear Health Minister Ron Liepert are the spin doctors -- all he wants is to make the system run better". Mr Bell was impressed with Mr Liepert's honesty that the public healthcare system may not be able to cover everything. "There is no plan at this stage for us to not cover something in the future," Mr Liepert told him. "But I'm reviewing everything. It would be irresponsible for us not to look at all aspects of the health system. That review needs to take place. For every dollar we spend, are we certain we need to spend it? I have to ensure the dollars I ask for are justified." Mr Liepert also chatted with the Edmonton Journal, for the paper's long, in-depth profile of him. In case you haven't heard him say it enough yet, he's sick and tired of consultations and studies. "You assess the pros and cons and make a bloody decision," he declared. "Ralph Klein did all sorts of consultations... How much success did they have? How much did health care change under Ralph Klein? So why would we follow the same path he did and get the same results?"
Charges for attempted murder have been brought against an 18-year-old who shot a man at the front entrance of a Halifax hospital last month.
Private prescription drug insurance plans, as exist in most of Canada, result in inequitable care provided by physicians in the public system, reported a new study by McMaster University economics and epidemiology professor Jeremiah Hurley and London School of Economics researcher Sara Allin in Health Economics. In another article, this time with the Mental Health Commission of Canada's Gillian Mulvale, Dr Hurley found that Canadian mental health patients without private drug insurance plans were less likely to be receiving pharmaceutical treatment for their illness.
Leslie Iwerk's Oscar-nominated short documentary, Downstream, has upset Alberta Minister of Culture Lindsay Blackett. The film, whose central character, family physician John O'Connor, was intimidated and investigated after he reported a cluster of unusual cancers near the oil-sands industrial developments in northern Alberta, received a $67,000 grant from the province. Mr Blackett claimed he didn't know the film's subject when the grant was approved; if he had, he told CBC News, he might not have given out the money. "[W]e're looking at now how do I get more information about it because — oh, it's a film about Alberta, it's a film about the oilsands — but who knew what it meant at the time?" Displaying a phenomenally questionable understanding of the role of arts grants, Mr Blackett explained, "Because if I'm going to actually invest money on behalf of Albertans into a film, the whole idea is to show Alberta in a better light, to create an economic diversification to help them, so anything that's going to be negative is only going to be a negative impetus on this province." He quickly renounced that position, resorting to the tried and true excuse that his quotes were taken out of context. "There is no provision now for any type of control over content, and we have no plans to institute any control over content," he told Fort McMurray Today. [Downstream is] "one of hundreds of different films that get produced, and we’ve got to have thicker skin," he said. I wrote about Downstream and Dr O'Connor in October. [Canadian Medicine]
Nicole Eaton, the director of the St Michael's Hospital Foundation, and Irving Gerstein, the former chair of the Mount Sinai Hospital board, are Prime Minister Stephen Harper's two new Senate appointments in Ontario. Mr Harper appointed 16 other people to the Senate across the country, including journalists Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin. [Maclean's]
Physicians at the Toronto General Hospital performed the world's transplant of lungs repaired while outside of the donor's or recipient's bodies. Their methodology could "easily double or triple the number of [donor] lungs used today," said Dr Shaf Keshavjee.
The New Brunswick government met with the province's nursing association to work on a strategy to attract foreign nurses.
A faster heart rate and breathing rate can predict post-traumatic stress disorder, a team of Australian psychiatrists wrote in last month's Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Reducing "acute arousal immediately after trauma... may limit PTSD development in some individuals," they suggested.
British scientists screened a bunch of embryos and chose one that didn't hold a gene that could predispose the child to breast cancer. The baby is due to be born next week.
"Now all they need in universal death care," snickered Milwaukee columnist Patrick McIlheran after he read about the patient who died in a Montreal walk-in clinic's waiting room after nobody attempt to perform resuscitation. "That happened in Quebec, where they do have universal, government-supported health care for all... It’s just, of course, that there’s no guarantee you’ll get any in time." But one blogger reminded Mr McIlheran that that the doctor in question, Jacques Chaoulli, is in fact opted out of the province's public healthcare system. "That's right," wrote Illusory Tenant. "McIlheran has selected the alleged negligence of a physician that derives his livelihood from U.S.-style private insurance plans as an example of how bad a public health care system is." You can read my earlier coverage of the case if you missed it before. [Canadian Medicine]