The overdose crisis in Ontario is often stereotyped as an “opioid injection” crisis. However, data show that significant numbers of overdoses are also being driven by stimulant drug use and inhalation drug use.
« Donnez, c’est dans votre nature. » C’est en tout cas ce qu’affirme l’ancien slogan de la Société canadienne du sang (SCS)*. Bien sûr, la SCS a une longue histoire de filtrage des personnes pouvant donner du sang. Actuellement, de nombreux Canadiens veulent en donner, mais ne le peuvent pas, notamment tous les hommes cisgenres séronégatifs qui ont eu des rapports sexuels avec un homme au cours des trois derniers mois. Cette exclusion s’applique à ceux qui ont une relation monogame, à ceux qui utilisent toujours la prophylaxie pré-exposition (PrEP), à ceux qui utilisent toujours un condom pendant leurs rapports sexuels et...
Just like across Canada, the number of overdoses continues to climb in Alberta because of a toxic drug supply, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic that has interrupted the supply of drugs. In Alberta, drug toxicity deaths have been devastating to people with lived or living experience of substance use, as well as their friends and families. In the province alone, we have seen 1,334 fatal overdoses in 2020. We mourn each person lost.
In 2020, Health Canada started to hold consultation meetings with key stakeholders to review federal regulations governing overdose prevention sites (OPS) and supervised consumption sites (SCS). While multiple recommendations and suggestions were brought forward, one that was repeatedly identified by people who use drugs and other stakeholders as being of top concern was the inability to split and share drugs within OPS/SCS settings.
British Columbia is the first province or territory in Canada to recommend one-time birth cohort screening for hepatitis C among people born from 1945 to 1965. This birth cohort has been identified as a key population that needs to be engaged into hepatitis C virus (HCV) care to reduce liver disease complications for several reasons: there are many undiagnosed cases of hepatitis C, they account for nearly 60% of positive hepatitis C results in B.C., and many people in this cohort have not received confirmatory HCV RNA testing.
Au Canada, une personne touchée par l’hépatite C sur trois est née à l’étranger. Le taux de prévalence de la maladie chez les immigrants et les nouveaux arrivants au Canada est deux fois supérieur à celui de l’ensemble de la population canadienne. Les recherches démontrent également que les résultats en matière de santé dus à l’hépatite virale et au cancer du foie des immigrants et des nouveaux arrivants sont plus graves que ceux observés chez la population endogène; à titre d’exemple, on notera des taux de carcinome hépatocellulaire et de mortalité dus à l’hépatite virale et au cancer hépatique de...
