vaccine

Canadian researchers thwart Ebola virus

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Christopher Black/The Canadian Press

Thursday, June 14, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

A team of Canadian researchers has developed one of the most effective cures yet for the Ebola virus. That’s big news both for treating the deadliest virus on Earth and tackling myriad other similarly aggressive diseases.

The treatment, in which injections of protein-grabbing antibodies stop a virus from replicating, has the longest treatment window so far resulting in full recovery – a full day. There’s just one catch: It can take up to two weeks for symptoms of the disease to appear.

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Canadian doctor zeroes in on Ebola vaccine

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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.”

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Canada’s pandemic response needs work, federal health agency says

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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.

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Pharma giant’s expansion could be a prescription for a better economy

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ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY 
Friday, March 04, 2011 – Globe and Mail

The wannabe lifesaving vaccines of the future are being test-driven on a treed campus in Toronto’s north end.

Here, in Sanofi Pasteur’s Canadian headquarters near Dufferin and Steeles, serums vaccines go from painstaking prototypes to mass-produced doses ready to be shipped worldwide. It’s a good time to be in the inoculation business – even for a site that’s been doing it for a century.

The vaccine giant’s made-in-Toronto breakthrough, a five-component shot protecting kids from whooping cough, has proven a billion-dollar international hit – so much so that the company is building a new $180-million manufacturing plant to keep up with exponentially growing demand.

But that’s just the beginning: Over the next 15 years, Sanofi Pasteur hopes to develop now largely fallow areas of its campus, land currently occupied primarily by trees and a couple of storage facilities.

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As disease threat rises, vaccination program rolls out

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Friday, January 29, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Aid agencies are rolling out an ambitious vaccine program in and around Port-au-Prince in an effort to stem what health experts fear is an impending public-health crisis.

Little by little, the biggest health challenge facing the millions of people displaced by the earthquake is becoming less about treatment for their injuries or even obtaining food and water.

Hundreds of thousands of people are living in an estimated 591 settlements in the Port-au-Prince area. As aid agencies struggle to find a better solution to the strung-together sheets under which people are taking shelter, tent-city denizens are taking matters into their own hands, building more permanent shelters out of scraps of wood and corrugated iron salvaged from the ruins.

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Private-clinic patients jump the line for flu shot

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Monday, November 2, 2009 – Globe and Mail
KAREN HOWLETT, ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY AND DAWN WALTON

TORONTO and CALGARY — Patients at private medical clinics in at least two provinces have jumped the queue for H1N1 vaccine during a nationwide shortage of the flu shot, rekindling a debate about the perils of two-tier health care in Canada.

Copeman Healthcare, a private clinic in Vancouver that charges patients annual membership fees of $3,900 in the first year, has already received its first shipment of H1N1 vaccine and is hoping for more soon, said chief operating officer Chris Nedelmann.

Medcan, a clinic in downtown Toronto that charges just under $2,000 for a head-to-toe checkup, received 3,000 doses last Friday, enough for 8 per cent of its patients.

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