: Healthhttps://globalnews.ca/?p=12031329&preview=true&preview_id=12031329<![CDATA[Ebola quarantine hindering response: aid workers]]>Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:28:11 +0000TORONTO – The night before Lily-Madeleine Seguin was set to book her flight to the Democratic Republic of Congo in late May, the Canadian government announced a three-week quarantine for travellers returning from the Ebola-stricken country.
Seguin, a public health promotion adviser with Oxfam’s global humanitarian team, had all of her final sign-offs and approvals green-lit. Her booster shots were updated.
She was ready to fly out two days later for a two-month deployment when she heard the news. It came as a shock to Seguin, who has been a part of previous Ebola outbreak responses in the DRC, including an 11-month deployment in 2018.
But she never went. There wouldn’t be enough time to quarantine between her return and the beginning of a sabbatical she had scheduled months before.
Now, three months later, the government’s mandatory 21-day quarantine is set to expire on Aug. 29. As the outbreak rages at an unprecedented speed, Seguin said she hopes Canadian officials will reverse course.
“To me, we’re not stepping up in the way that we should be as a country that does have the ability to do it and changing the quarantine regulations is a low-stakes way of being able to do it,” Seguin said.
She is not the only one who feels this way.
Canadian humanitarian aid workers say their ability to respond to the outbreak has been stifled by the country’s long quarantine period, forcing some to stay home or cut their deployments short. They say an extension of the mandatory 21-day quarantine for Canadians and permanent residents returning from the DRC, Uganda or South Sudan could be detrimental to the outbreak response.
The World Health Organization has said this is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history, on track to be the deadliest, with Africa’s top public health agency reporting more than 2,500 deaths out of more than 5,000 infections.
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Canada’s government said it’s currently reviewing the restrictions and latest evidence alongside international partners and will announce a decision on next steps before the expiration date next week.
When the measures were announced in May, the approaching FIFA World Cup was pegged as a key reason for the strict rules, aligning with co-hosting countries, the United States and Mexico. Canada’s health minister said at the time that “it’s not a question of science,” but of protecting people from the lasting trauma of past outbreaks.
At least 11 Canadians with highly valuable expertise have had to cancel their assignments with MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders, as of Aug. 20 because of the quarantine measures, the organization says. Twenty-three Canadians in total have been a part of MSF’s Ebola response in the DRC.
Adam Houston, medical policy and advocacy adviser at MSF Canada, said some of those Canadians would have been deployed to other humanitarian efforts in the conflict-ridden region and that the measures have affected more than just the Ebola response.
“This is impacting our ability for Canadians to participate,” Houston said.
Mylene Ratelle, who was hired as a health promotion manager at MSF, said she would have stayed in the DRC for far longer than she did, but she had to come home to quarantine for three weeks before the start of the fall semester.
“I’m very critical about how Canada chose to implement their public health measures,” Ratelle said from her apartment in Montreal, where she was quarantining, back to pandemic-era baking instead of contact tracing in the DRC.
As a professor of public health who has worked for Canada’s public health agency, Ratelle said she was disappointed by the lack of scientific basis for Canada’s strict border measures.
Ebola does not spread through the air or casual contact, but through bodily fluids like blood, vomit and semen. People also generally do not spread the virus before they get sick, which can take two to 21 days after infection.
Roojin Habibi, research director of global health law at the Global Strategy Lab at the University of Ottawa and York University, said Canada’s travel restrictions go against expert guidance from the World Health Organization, which has criticized blanket travel restrictions, and said that they are based on fear, not science.
“To me, it’s quite egregious,” she said.
Habibi said the government has communicated to the public that the risk of Ebola spreading here is very low, but she sees the measures implemented as a way to avoid people saying that not enough was done to protect Canadians.
Karine LeBlanc, a senior communications adviser at Health Canada, said the government is “continually reviewing the measures alongside the latest evidence with international partners and will determine next steps before the existing measures are set to expire.”
LeBlanc says the temporary measures are not intended to eliminate all risk, “but to reduce the likelihood of importation, support early identification of potentially ill travellers, and therefore reduce the risk of potential spread to others in Canada.”
The mandatory quarantine also applies to Canadians returning from South Sudan and Uganda. South Sudan has not reported a case of Ebola in this outbreak. Uganda’s ministry of health declared its outbreak over on July 28, after 20 people were infected, including two deaths.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control advises travellers returning from the DRC or Uganda to self-monitor for symptoms and only quarantine if they had a high-risk exposure, such as direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person or close face-to-face contact with someone coughing, vomiting or bleeding, who has the virus.
Seguin said it’s not that she thinks her presence would have curbed the spread of the outbreak, but that it pains her to see Canada sending this signal to the rest of the world.
The government has committed $8 million to support the fight against the outbreak, but she said it is pennies compared to the more the $110 million of financial assistance during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
“All the decisions that the Canadian government has decided to make over the past few months around the Ebola outbreak, none of them have been very forthright in saying, we understand that this is a global priority and as Canada we’re going to step up to help in the ways that are equal to the capacities that we have in this country.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 22, 2026.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
]]>: Healthhttps://globalnews.ca/?p=12029890<![CDATA[‘No indication’ U.S. blueberry recall for death risk impacts Canada: CFIA]]>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:44:36 +0000
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says “there is no indication” the blueberries and mixed berries in a major U.S. recall over the risk of serious illness and potential death were distributed in Canada.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration upgraded a recall of frozen blueberries and mixed berries sold at Publix grocery stores across the country to a Class 1 recall, the highest health risk level on Tuesday, citing E. coli contamination. Publix initially recalled the affected products on July 29.
The CFIA told Global News in a statement that it is “aware of the in the United States (U.S.),” and “based on the information currently available, there is no indication that the products affected by this recall were distributed in Canada.”
The recalled products are GreenWise Organic Whole Blueberries in 10-ounce and 48-ounce packages and GreenWise Organic Whole Mixed Berries in 10-ounce and 48-ounce packages.
Twelve people infected with the outbreak strain of E. coli have been reported in two states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
No deaths linked to the outbreak have been reported.
The products were distributed in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
Publix also “immediately” implemented an internal stop sale of frozen GreenWise Organic Whole Blueberries and Whole Mixed Berries at the end of June, and the products remain unavailable for purchase.
A Class 1 recall is ” a situation in which there is a reasonable probability that the use of or exposure to a violative product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death,” according to the FDA.
]]>: Healthhttps://globalnews.ca/?p=12028846<![CDATA[Congo to receive 70K doses of Ervebo Ebola vaccine used in past outbreaks]]>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:22:43 +0000
Congo will receive 70,000 doses of the Ervebo vaccine, which has been effective in past Ebola outbreaks, the World Health Organization and partners said Thursday, announcing a step seen as a major boost to efforts to contain what officials have described as the fastest Ebola outbreak in history.
The Ervebo vaccine is licensed for use against Ebola virus, one of the viruses that cause Ebola disease, but not for Bundibugyo virus, which is responsible for the current outbreak which has so far killed 2,476 people out of the 5,208 confirmed cases
WHO said in a statement that while it’s not known whether Ervebo may protect against the Bundibugyo virus, “early laboratory and animal data suggest it may provide some protection.”
The allocation includes 20,000 doses for a Phase 3 clinical trial to understand the impact of the vaccine on the Bundibugyo virus, the agency said. The remaining 50,000 doses will be used for front-line and health workers as recommended by WHO experts.
The outbreak raging in six provinces in eastern Congo has infected and killed more people at a greater speed than any other Ebola outbreak in history, and is spreading about three times faster compared to the 2014-2016 outbreak across West Africa — the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record with more than 11,000 deaths.
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The International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision, which includes WHO and other partners, said the doses will be released immediately following a request from Congo’s government.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the approval “an important example of global solidarity in action.” He said the agency and its partners remain committed to supporting strengthened surveillance, rapid detection, quality care, community engagement and vaccination efforts to bring the outbreak under control.
The lack of approved vaccines or treatments for the rare Bundibugyo virus has been a major issue for responders. Most new cases have been reported outside of the people being monitored, showing the virus continues to spread faster than efforts to track it. That has been a key contributor to the recorded deaths.
The case fatality rate so far is 47.5 per cent although it is far worse in some places where response efforts are more challenging, such as in North Kivu province where the fatality rate is up to 70 per cent.
Experts believe the virus began spreading from the mining town of Mongbwalu as early as February, months before authorities declared the outbreak on May 15.
]]>: Healthhttps://globalnews.ca/?p=12027239<![CDATA[Ultra low emission zones linked to improved lung capacity in kids: UK study]]>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:12:49 +0000
Children’s lung capacity improved significantly after vehicles that cause the most pollution were prohibited from driving in certain parts of London, U.K., designated as low and ultra low emissions zones, a new study found.
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Oxford University examined over 3,000 school children aged six to nine in central London and Luton before and after the introduction of the ultra low low emissions zones (ulez) and found that the London children’s’ lung capacity was restored to healthy levels after it was initially stunted by exposure to pollution.
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Luton, the study’s comparator site, is a town outside of London and does not have any designated clean air zones.
“This evidence supports wider implementation of clean air zones as a public health intervention,” the study says, arguing that it marks an evidentiary breakthrough for an initiative which in the past had been criticized for burdening drivers.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan introduced the plan more than seven years ago, and wrote in an essay for The Guardian this week that when it was first suggested he faced backlash from his detractors, who he said accused him of declaring “war on drivers in blind pursuit of a policy that may not even work.”
New findings showed it to be effective.
Over four years the study found that the percentage of children with impaired lung function decreased in both London and Luton, from 14 per cent to nine per cent in London and from nine per cent to seven per cent in Luton.
“To our knowledge, we provide the first evidence that air quality improvements following introduction of a clean air zone are associated with improved lung growth trajectories in children,” the study’s authors wrote.
According to their findings, exposure to traffic related air-pollution is strongly linked to impaired lung development in children and adolescents and failure to reach maximal lung growth poses an increased risk for asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiometabolic disease, and earlier mortality.
It also showed that children’s lung growth accelerated in ultra low emissions zones and that it was correlated with an improvement in air quality. The depletion of their lung capacity was linked specifically to the presence of nitrogen dioxide.
Based on the evidence researchers concluded that low emissions zones should be implemented more broadly, and on an international scale.
“Children continue to be exposed to poor air quality in cities globally,'” they wrote, “decision makers globally should consider accelerating the introduction of clean air zones to improve children’s lung health.”
There are no similar initiatives currently operational in Canada.
The federal government does set out vehicle emission standards, which require car makers to meet increasingly stringent low emissions requirements.
Toronto has considered implementing congestion charges and low emissions zones to reduce traffic along major travel routes. These policies typically require drivers to pay to use a polluting vehicle within certain areas.
Moderna shares more than doubled Wednesday after it announced initial results from a study of an experimental cancer treatment that would be the first of its kind if approved by regulators.
Moderna and Merck are developing a treatment using an mRNA-based cancer vaccine called intismeran that is designed to be tailored to individual patients based on unique mutations within their tumors. In current studies, they are pairing it with Keytruda, a immunotherapy drug made by Merck.
The study compared using intismeran and Keytruda together on melanoma patients against using Keytruda alone. The companies said patients who received the combination lived longer without cancer returning or metastasizing than patients who got Keytruda alone.
The companies did not say how long patients survived without cancer returning or whether patients lived longer overall. They said they plan to present the study results at an upcoming international medical meeting.
Moderna shares rose more than 120 per cent to $140.12 a share. Merck shares rose about 11 per cent.
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