: Healthhttps://globalnews.ca/?p=11123312<![CDATA[Have a pet? They could boost your happiness as much as $120K a year]]>Thu, 10 Apr 2025 18:54:48 +0000Want to know what’s worth as much as a six-figure pay rise?
A pet.
New research shows that owning a dog or cat could provide the same emotional boost as earning an additional $120,000 CAD annually.
The study, published March 31 in the journal Social Indicators Research, shed light on the impact pets have on human happiness, finding that they can also give a life satisfaction boost equal to regular hangouts with friends or even being married.
“More and more people are reporting pets to be members of the family,” said Jacklyn Ellis, director of behaviour, at the Toronto Humane Society. “So there is certainly a shift in the way we think of how these animals fit into our lives.”
Sixty per cent of Canadian households own at least one cat or dog, according to 2022 data from the Canadian Animal Health Institute (CAHI), with an estimated 8.5 million cats and 7.9 million dogs in homes across the country.
“Companionship, this certainly helps foster positive mental health on a day-to-day basis, which can help make you more resilient to crises that come up and certainly are associated with more satisfaction scores and better quality of life assessments to pet owners,” Ellis said.
Although this is known, the researchers from the new United Kingdom data wanted to understand if owning a pet directly boosts happiness, rather than it being a case that happy people tend to own pets.
While pet ownership is often linked with greater well-being, the study emphasized that this relationship is complex — and sometimes it’s people facing loneliness or life challenges who seek out pets, rather than the other way around.
“There is substantial evidence from psychology and medicine that pets are associated with better health and higher life satisfaction of their human companions. Yet whether this relationship is causal or purely a correlation remains largely unknown,” the researchers said at the introduction of their study.
The study also aimed to quantify the mental benefits of pet care on psychological well-being and life satisfaction.
Ellis mentioned that she had never seen this approach before and called the results “fascinating.”
The incredible story of the B.C. cat that came back
To see how pets affect happiness, researchers used a survey in the U.K. with data from 2,500 households. They focused on households with cats and dogs, not other pets like fish or rabbits.
Participants, ages 16 to 99, rated their overall life satisfaction. The researchers took into account things like personality, health, and social connections, and used a method called “instrumental variables” to make sure pet ownership wasn’t just a result of being happier.
This helped them figure out how they say pets alone impact life satisfaction.
When researchers compared pet owners to non-pet owners, they found that pet owners actually reported slightly lower life satisfaction on average. On a scale of one to seven, pet owners scored 5.2, while non-pet owners came in slightly higher at 5.29.
But the researchers stressed that the small difference doesn’t necessarily mean pets make people less happy. The researchers said this could be because people who are already feeling lonely or low may be more likely to get a pet for companionship. That’s why the study used data to figure out the real cause-and-effect relationship.
When it comes to pets, about 22 per cent of the people in the study said they cared for a pet— either a cat, a dog, or another type of animal.
The researchers noticed some clear trends. For example, people who owned pets tended to be more extroverted, open and conscientious. They were also more likely to be married and have kids living with them, which often means a bigger household.
When comparing cat and dog owners specifically, they found that cat owners scored higher on traits like openness and conscientiousness but were less extroverted than dog owners. They also noticed that cat owners were slightly more neurotic.
Letting the dogs out through Canicross
Overall, the researchers found that owning a dog seemed to have a positive impact on life satisfaction. The effect for cat owners was positive too, but less significant.
The researchers also aimed to put a monetary value on the happiness people get from owning a pet.
They found that pets, especially dogs, had a pretty big impact on people’s happiness, estimating the value of having a dog in one’s life to be about $120,000 CAD — a number that’s comparable to what other studies have found as the comparable monetary value of regular social interactions, like meeting up with friends and family.
The study also explored whether having a pet could take the place of having a romantic partner, like a spouse.
It found that pets can potentially act as an emotional substitute for a partner, especially for people who aren’t married.
“We observe that the interaction term between pets and being married reduces the coefficient for dogs and hypothesise that pet companionship can potentially be viewed as a substitute for relationships at home,” the researchers said.
Ellis suggested that there are a few reasons why cats and dogs bring us happiness, and why we bring them happiness in return.
A big part of this comes from the long history of domestication, where over thousands of years, humans and pets have developed a deep understanding of each other’s behaviours and emotional needs, she said. This mutual understanding creates a bond that’s more like a symbiotic relationship.
“They’re also just completely much more expressive pets than a lot of other animals can be, so it’s a lot easier to watch a dog’s body language and know exactly how they’re feeling,” she said.
And for those who crave the companionship of a dog or cat but can’t have one, Ellis suggested volunteering at a shelter or trying pet fostering.
“It can be even more meaningful for people who are dealing with loneliness or social isolation. It can make a huge difference in those situations,” she said.
]]>: Healthhttps://globalnews.ca/?p=11125038<![CDATA[Canada has a chance to turn U.S. brain drain into brain gain: CMA]]>Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:35:23 +0000
Canada should seize the opportunity to turn the U.S. brain drain of doctors and scientists into its own “brain gain,” the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) says.
In a statement posted Thursday, CMA president Dr. Joss Reimer said that many American medical professionals, feeling undervalued due to mass layoffs and cuts to health programs and research positions under the Trump administration, may be seeking new opportunities.
And Canadian politicians should take notice, she said.
“While this period brings with it many challenges for Canada, it also offers unique opportunities,” Joss stated.
The Medical Council of Canada (MCC) previously Global News that the number of U.S. medical graduates opening accounts on physiciansapply.ca — a key step toward obtaining a medical licence in Canada — has risen 583 per cent between October 2024 and March 2025, compared to the same period last year.
While this is a positive step, the CMA warned that recruiting physicians and other health workers cannot be left to patchwork efforts; it must be a “national priority.”
“The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) is urging the federal government to streamline processes to help health professionals enter Canada’s health workforce more efficiently,” Joss stated.
This means updating immigration policies to help hospitals, health authorities and provinces that are already recruiting health workers, she said.
The government should also use ministerial exemptions to create a faster, easier path for qualified U.S. doctors and other health-care professionals to join Canada’s workforce, the CMA said.
“We are also calling on each of the federal party leaders to commit to these actions to improve access to care,” Joss said. “Canada has a unique opportunity in this moment to take advantage of this brain gain to become a scientific and medical powerhouse.”
Why are egg prices in the U.S. soaring instead of coming down after Trump inaguration?
WATCH: One of U.S. President Donald Trump's most notable campaign promises centered around lowering the cost of eggs. But since his inauguration, businesses and retailers across the United States are getting hit hard by climbing egg prices, and a recent bird flu outbreak at a Southern Indiana farm could drive up the cost of the essential ingredient even more – Jan 31, 2025
In defiance of United States President Donald Trump’s predictions, U.S. egg prices increased again last month to reach a new record-high of $6.23 despite a drop in wholesale prices and no egg farms having bird flu outbreaks.
The increase reported Thursday in the Consumer Price Index means consumers and businesses that rely on eggs should not anticipate immediate relief. Demand for eggs is typically elevated until after Easter, which falls on April 20.
Industry experts were expecting the index to reflect a drop in retail egg prices because wholesale egg prices dropped significantly in March.
Is Canada’s supply management system working amid ongoing food inflation?
Bird flu outbreaks were cited as the major cause of price spikes in January and February after more than 30 million egg-laying chickens were killed to prevent the spread of the disease.
Some farms that had fall outbreaks are resuming egg production after sanitizing their barns and raising new flocks.
Trump tried to take credit for the lower wholesale egg prices the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in recent weeks. But experts say the president’s plan to fight bird flu by focusing on strengthening egg farmers’ defenses against the virus is likely to be more of a long-term help.
]]>: Healthhttps://globalnews.ca/?p=11124950<![CDATA[Mouse watches The Matrix, scientists map brain that looks like a ‘galaxy’]]>Thu, 10 Apr 2025 12:31:26 +0000Thanks to a mouse watching clips from The Matrix, scientists have created the largest functional map of a brain to date – a diagram of the wiring connecting 84,000 neurons as they fire off messages.
Using a piece of that mouse’s brain about the size of a poppy seed, the researchers identified those neurons and traced how they communicated via branch-like fibers through a surprising 500 million junctions called synapses.
The massive dataset, published Wednesday by the journal Nature, marks a step toward unraveling the mystery of how our brains work. The data, assembled in a 3D reconstruction colored to delineate different brain circuitry, is open to scientists worldwide for additional research – and for the simply curious to take a peek.
“It definitely inspires a sense of awe, just like looking at pictures of the galaxies,” said Forrest Collman of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, one of the project’s leading researchers. “You get a sense of how complicated you are. We’re looking at one tiny part … of a mouse’s brain and the beauty and complexity that you can see in these actual neurons and the hundreds of millions of connections between them.”
How we think, feel, see, talk and move are due to neurons, or nerve cells, in the brain – how they’re activated and send messages to each other. Scientists have long known those signals move from one neuron along fibers called axons and dendrites, using synapses to jump to the next neuron. But there’s less known about the networks of neurons that perform certain tasks and how disruptions of that wiring could play a role in Alzheimer’s, autism or other disorders.
“You can make a thousand hypotheses about how brain cells might do their job but you can’t test those hypotheses unless you know perhaps the most fundamental thing – how are those cells wired together,” said Allen Institute scientist Clay Reid, who helped pioneer electron microscopy to study neural connections.
This photo provided by the Allen Institute shows, from left, Associate Director of Informatics Forrest Collman, Data Analyst Leila Elabbady and Senior Investigator Clay Reid reviewing neuron reconstructions for the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks project in Dec. 2024, in Seattle, Wash.
Jenny Burns/Allen Institute via AP
With the new project, a global team of more than 150 researchers mapped neural connections that Collman compares to tangled pieces of spaghetti winding through part of the mouse brain responsible for vision.
The first step: Show a mouse video snippets of sci-fi movies, sports, animation and nature.
A team at Baylor College of Medicine did just that, using a mouse engineered with a gene that makes its neurons glow when they’re active. The researchers used a laser-powered microscope to record how individual cells in the animal’s visual cortex lit up as they processed the images flashing by.
Next, scientists at the Allen Institute analyzed that small piece of brain tissue, using a special tool to shave it into more than 25,000 layers, each far thinner than a human hair. With electron microscopes, they took nearly 100 million high-resolution images of those sections, illuminating those spaghetti-like fibers and painstakingly reassembling the data in 3D.
Finally, Princeton University scientists used artificial intelligence to trace all that wiring and “paint each of the individual wires a different color so that we can identify them individually,” Collman explained.
They estimated that microscopic wiring, if laid out, would measure more than five kilometres.. Importantly, matching up all that anatomy with the activity in the mouse’s brain as it watched movies allowed researchers to trace how the circuitry worked.
Scientists discover trigger point for kill instinct in mice using lasers
The Princeton researchers also created digital 3D copies of the data that other scientists can use in developing new studies.
Could this kind of mapping help scientists eventually find treatments for brain diseases? The researchers call it a foundational step, like how the Human Genome Project that provided the first gene mapping eventually led to gene-based treatments. Mapping a full mouse brain is one next goal.
“The technologies developed by this project will give us our first chance to really identify some kind of abnormal pattern of connectivity that gives rise to a disorder,” another of the project’s leading researchers, Princeton neuroscientist and computer scientist Sebastian Seung, said in a statement.
The work “marks a major leap forwards and offers an invaluable community resource for future discoveries,” wrote Harvard neuroscientists Mariela Petkova and Gregor Schuhknecht, who weren’t involved in the project.
The huge and publicly shared data “will help to unravel the complex neural networks underlying cognition and behavior,” they added.
]]>: Healthhttps://globalnews.ca/?p=11121140<![CDATA[New York warns travellers about Canada: ‘Measles is just a car ride away!’]]>Tue, 08 Apr 2025 14:52:53 +0000
As measles cases continue to rise in Canada, particularly in Ontario, one U.S. state is taking notice of the surge and warning its residents about travel.
Last week, the New York State Department of Health issued a travel advisory ahead of the state’s spring break, stating that measles is highly contagious and “can easily cross borders.”
The department warned that outbreaks are currently happening in parts of the United States, Canada — especially Ontario — and in other areas around the world.
“Measles is only a car ride away! Measles is a highly contagious virus. Around 90% of people who are exposed to a person with measles will become infected if they are not vaccinated,” the health department said in a statement on April 2.
“With spring and summer travel season approaching, anyone who is not protected can get measles while traveling and can easily spread it to others when they return home.”
Measles, a vaccine-preventable disease, is surging across Canada, alarming health officials as new cases pop up throughout the country, with cases piling up in Ontario.
Canada’s measles outbreak began in October after a travel-related case in New Brunswick sparked outbreaks there and in Ontario.
New Brunswick declared its outbreak over in January, but the virus is still spreading in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada.
Canada may lose measles elimination status if outbreak not brought under control
Since the beginning of 2025, a total of 655 measles cases — 560 confirmed and 95 probable — have been reported in Ontario as of April 2, according to Public Health Ontario.
In comparison, just 101 confirmed cases were reported in the entire decade between 2013 and 2023, and 64 cases were recorded in 2024 alone.
The spike in cases has caught the attention of New York State health officials.
“The ongoing outbreak in Canada has reached over 600 cases with the majority (570 cases) occurring in Ontario,” the department stated.
In addition to Canada, the department said that measles cases in many other countries have increased, including Yemen, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Ethiopia, Romania, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan and Vietnam.
Measles is one of the most contagious infectious diseases — more contagious than diseases like COVID-19, influenza and chickenpox. This high level of contagiousness is one reason why measles outbreaks can spread rapidly, particularly in areas with low vaccination rates.
The best way to protect yourself against the measles is to get vaccinated, public health officials say.
In Canada, the measles vaccine is offered as either the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) or the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine. A single dose — typically given at 12 or 15 months of age — is estimated to be 85 to 95 per cent effective.
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), a second dose boosts protection to nearly 100 per cent.
Measles cases climb across Canada amid concerns of undetected spread
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