Gary Kobinger has been chasing vaccines since childhood.
Growing up in Quebec City in the early 1990s, he remembers being galvanized to action by documentaries about people infected with HIV-AIDS – back when the illness was still new, mysterious and terrifying.
“In my mind, as a teenager, this was unacceptable. So I decided this was where I would put my energy.”
Remember back when Ontario rolled out an online narcotics-prescription database – one meant to track exactly who is prescribing what to whom? The idea is to prevent “double-doctoring” and ensuring that doctors, pharmacists and Health Ministry officials ensure that people who need drugs are getting them.
The database was in testing phase as of November, 2011 and was supposed to be operational early this year. But the people prescribing the drugs still can’t access it. That means they have no idea what other drugs a potential patient could be taking, or was taking. In some cases, it means patients can’t get the drugs they need.
Toronto doctor Irfan Dhalla said doctors still have no idea when they’re going to get in on this database – but they’d really, really like to.
Photo by John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail
Thursday, April 12, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
TORONTO — The battle over whether to give addicts a safe place to inject has moved to Ontario from the West Coast.
When the Supreme Court of Canada handed Vancouver’s supervised injection site a legal victory late last year by denying the federal government’s attempt to shutter it, many observers expected the ruling to give rise to similar sites across Canada.
Not so fast.
Karen Reeves, who was diagnosed with epilepsy 11 years ago, is photographed at her home in Waterloo, Ont. Thursday, March 29, 2012. Reeves has struggled to get epilepsy drugs and is now forced to travel to Florida every 3 months to fill her prescription.
Photo by Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY and KIM MACKRAEL
When the only drug that effectively stopped Karen Reeves’s seizures became unavailable in Canada, she didn’t find out until her pharmacist couldn’t fill her prescription – the medication wasn’t there. Replacement shipments never showed up.
Welcome to the new normal of prescription drug supplies.
Photo by Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
Thursday, April 5, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Jason Kenney has had it with incremental measures.
“It frustrates the hell out of me,” the Immigration Minister told The Globe and Mail’s editorial board on Wednesday. “We’re bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the country to end up, many of them, unemployed or underemployed in an economy where there are acute labour shortages.”
Photo by Carolyn Kaster/AP
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Mexican President Felipe Calderon cites the arrest of Canadian consultant Cynthia Vanier on accusations of trying to smuggle one of Moammar Gadhafi’s sons out of Libya as a prime example of successful security co-operation between Mexico, Canada and the United States.
Thing is, Canada has yet to elucidate exactly what its role was in Ms. Vanier’s arrest and the investigation leading up to it – and her lawyer, among others, would really like to know.
Photo by Moe Doiron/The Globe and Mail
Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews says the province has no immediate plans to put Suboxone on the Ontario Drug Benefit, which would make it more readily available to treat addicts who can’t get methadone, a more common treatment for opioid addiction. Health-care practitioners, especially in remote areas, want to use Suboxone more in cases where there are simply no licensed methadone doctors around, or no spaces available. Buprenorphine, the active ingredient in Suboxone, is supposed to be safer and easier for others (nurses, for example) to give out. It’s also really expensive.
Photo by Henry Romero/Reuters
April 3, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
There are still serious shortcomings in the way public-health bodies communicate with physicians, nurses and pharmacists on the front lines of a pandemic, says the Public Health Agency of Canada.
And almost three years after a flu pandemic put the country on high alert, the federal agency has put out a call for a new strategy to improve communication with clinicians during pandemic response.
Susanna Blunt, who designed the latest queen on Canada's coins, seen here at Capilano University, in North Vancouver.
Photo by John Lehmann/Globe and Mail
Saturday, March 31, 2012 – Globe and Mail
Despite its lowly monetary status, the penny is a high-maintenance bit of metal. It is by far the most expensive Canadian coin to produce, relative to its value. At a cost of a little over 1.6 cents per penny, it’s the only piece of currency in the country that now costs more than its value to make.
While the news of the penny’s phase-out came as a surprise even to the Royal Canadian Mint, the analysts and coin-crafters in charge of Canada’s money say they’ve known for years its days were numbered.
Photo courtesy of South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology
Wednesday, March 7 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
A few ground-up grams of spongy bone, drilled from a 5,300-year-old mummy’s right hip and painstakingly bathed, sequenced and analyzed, have yielded a near-complete genome of Italy’s Iceman. The discovery not only offers a glimpse into an early human ancestor, but also gives a fresh perspective on one of the leading causes of death in the 21st century: The Iceman had a genetic predisposition to heart disease
a business of misfits 