“Barlagne and his wife Sophie moved to Montreal from the French island of Guadeloupe five years ago with their handicapped daughter and another child. Barlagne said officials at the Canadian Embassy in Paris granted him a temporary work permit after convincing him Canada was a great location for his software development business.”

“But when the Barlagnes applied to stay permanently in Canada, their bid was rejected on the grounds that Rachel’s care would create an excessive burden on health and social services.

Rachel’s care would cost the system $5,259 per year, said the Barlagnes’ lawyer, Stéphane Minson.”

“Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it’s no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.”

“The severity of the H1N1 outbreak was deliberately exaggerated by pharmaceutical companies that stood to make billions of dollars from a worldwide scare, a leading European health expert has claimed.”

Michelle Smith for The Age:

It is not the kind of disease you would much think about. No cricketers’ wives will contract it, and you won’t be invited to attend any feel-good fund-raising soirees in its honour. It is a disease that has and will affect manual workers, almost 90 per cent male.

My mum was an unlucky case of mesothelioma, the cancer caused by asbestos exposure, in a woman. An industrial expert surmised that she had been exposed as a child. Her father was employed by the Melbourne Board of Works. Like many men who unknowingly carried home asbestos fibres on their clothing for their wives to wash or children to inhale when hugging them, his work with plumbing supplies made with asbestos is probably the reason my mum is gone.

She will never know her grandchildren, but James Hardie, the company responsible for manufacturing asbestos despite widespread knowledge of its risks, trades on.

“school cafeteria workers in some of Sodexo’s districts are being disciplined for staying home while they’re sick, even though they prepare and serve food for a living.

Watch Illinois school cafeteria worker Cathy Gaul tell her story and then spread the word by telling your friends about our campaign”

– Sodexo’s website boasts that they are the #3 corporation to outsource to (from private prisons to food services).

Toronto Media Co-op | Community occupies Metro Hall after City refuses to process Special Diet applications

The 20 Quebec doctors who have threatened to leave Sept-Iles if a uranium mine is built are not backing down. The list includes specialists, such as an anesthesiologist. Working class power.

MONTREAL – Doctors threatening a mass resignation in protest over a plan to open a uranium mine near their North Shore community got a severe reprimand on Monday.

“After spending the last year fighting mining exploration activities, 20 of the 57 hospital physicians – psychiatrists, family doctors, anesthetists, a lung specialist, surgeons, gynecologists – said they needed to inform the public about potential radioactive contamination of the town’s water supply.”

“Yves Lamontagne, head of the Quebec College of Physicians, said it would be unethical for 20 doctors in Sept Îles to walk out on the job and leave the population without proper health services.”

“Hundreds of residents of the Indian city of Bhopal have held a vigil to mark 25 years since a deadly chemical leak in the city caused the world’s worst industrial disaster.”

“John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, last night told the Observer that patient safety had been neglected by hospitals too busy meeting NHS-imposed financial targets: “Too many hospitals are too concerned with meeting financial targets at the expense of clinical standards, and we are seeing patients suffering as a consequence.”

“Today’s research exposes systemic failures in large parts of the NHS during the last financial year and finds:

■ 39% of trusts failing to investigate unexpected deaths or cases of serious harm on their wards.

■ At least 209 incidents in which “foreign objects”, such as swabs and drill-bits, were left inside patients after surgery.

■ At least 82 cases in which medical staff operated on the wrong part of the patient’s body.

It finds that 5,024 people died after being admitted for “low-risk” conditions such as asthma or appendicitis, of whom 848 were under 65. A proportion of those deaths will be linked to safety errors.”

–Yet another failing of the conservative “analysis”.

“Nine rooms in the Stanley School Complex have tested positive for radon levels higher than what’s considered acceptable by Health Canada.

“There are no immediate health concerns related to this,” said Wanda Bauer, District 18’s director of administration and finance. “It simply means those rooms will have to be ventilated within the next 24 months.”"

-No immediate health concern indeed, it will take years for the exposure to manifest itself as cancer, and there will be no way of proving it was the fault of District 18 not taking immediate action. Shame.

“The petition says that the government pledged $18 million to the IPPF over four years and that “the IPPF does not support physician’s freedom to practice according to their conscience and/or religious beliefs regarding abortion referral.”"

“…the decision by Toronto’s medical officer of health to give Medcan, described as a preventative health-care clinic, 3,000 doses of the vaccines for its high-paying members.”

See also:
Ontario outlines vaccine restrictions: If not in a priority group, ‘please wait your turn’

N.B. flu clinics restrict vaccine access
“A shortage of H1N1 flu vaccine is forcing the cancellation of a number of public clinics around New Brunswick and tighter restrictions for those that remain open.”

All Albertans to get H1N1 vaccine: minister
“On Saturday, officials with Alberta Health Services announced all H1N1 vaccination clinics would be closed until further notice in light of a national reduction in the number of doses.”

Restricting the availability of legal abortion does not appear to reduce the number of women trying to end unwanted pregnancies, a major report suggests.
You might also want to read this article from Counterpunch’s John Ross: War on Mexican Women – “Get Your Rosaries Out of Our Ovaries!”

“Hey, ho — Stelmach has to go,” legions of people marched yesterday to Alberta Hospital Edmonton to protest a plan to shut down 246 acute care mental health beds amid fears more than half of those could be closed by December.

“Let me be clear – it would only be an option for those who don’t have insurance…less than 5% of Americans would sign up.” [Obama]
“Obama solemnly pledged that “ like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.”
“[Obama's] plan wouldn’t offer services to illegal immigrants. By so saying, of course, Obama was acknowledging that he had just lied when he declared at the start of his speech that adequate medical care is a basic human right. Are undocumented workers , who sustain America’s agriculture and much of its building industry, not humans, or humans without rights like the captives Obama still wishes to classify as beyond the protections of the Geneva Protocols?”

–The US continues to be a bizarre place, from the outside looking in. The right-wing continue to lie about the entire process and the media just go along as if they don’t know any better. The reforms to the media in the US looks to be as important as any issue that is raging right now. The position of many who care about the news industry continue to push for a co-operative, non-profit model for some of the major newspapers to shield them from corporate interference. Similar arguments need to be made for health care.

“The star of ‘24′ is played by Kiefer Sutherland, whose family has very deep connections to health care reform–in Canada. Sutherland is the grandson of the late Tommy Douglas, the pioneering Canadian politician who is credited with creating the modern Canadian health care system.”

“Two truckers were exposed to excessive doses of radiation last year while hauling a radioactive device across the country… a technician with Nomad Inspection Services of Olds, Alta… did not fasten a safety lock to a radioactive device before it was packaged and shipped”.

–Oh, SNAP!