Health

Canada’s fertility rate, which has been steadily declining, has hit a record low and the country is now among the “lowest-low” fertility nations.

Statistics Canada released new data on Wednesday showing that the Canadian fertility rate in 2023 was 1.26 children per woman, which is the lowest recorded level since the agency began collecting data.

The record-low fertility rate was registered across the country in 10 of the 13 provinces and territories.

Fertility rate is an estimate of the average number of live births a woman can be expected to have in her reproductive life, according to StatCan.

In 2022, the fertility rate had already fallen to a record low of 1.33 children per woman. But that record has now been broken again.

“This decline from 2022 to 2023 mostly reflects an increase in the number of women of childbearing age in 2023, as the number of births was similar in both years,” StatCan said.

In total, 351,477 babies were born in Canada last year, which is similar to the number from 2022.

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With the new data on fertility, Canada joins the group of “lowest-low” fertility countries that have a rate of 1.3 children per woman or less, StatCan said.

South Korea, Spain, Italy and Japan are other nations in this categorized group.

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A StatCan report published in January said Canada, like other countries, is riding the “fertility ‘pandemic rollercoaster’” with more families putting off having children.

“Given the COVID-19 pandemic initiated a period of public health crisis, as well as economic and societal shocks, it is possible that a segment of the population responded to this period of widespread uncertainty via their childbearing choices,” it reads.

Experts also point to prolonged economic uncertainty, the high cost of living, lifestyle changes and work decisions for the drop in births.

“It’s been tight for a lot of people. Inflation certainly hasn’t helped. For some couples, looking at their paycheques, looking at their expenses, they’re saying, ‘Maybe now is not an ideal time to have kids,’” Don Kerr, a demographer at King’s University College at Western University in London, Ont., told Global News in January.

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StatCan also reported that the rate of premature births has increased over the past three decades.

In 2023, it reached the highest level in 50 years at 8.3 per cent.

Preterm or premature birth is when the baby is born before 37 weeks of pregnancy are completed.

Babies that are born prematurely are at an increased risk of illness, hospitalization and death.

“The increase in the rate of premature births could be related to the higher proportion of older mothers, as risk of a premature birth increases as the age of the mother increases,” StatCan said.

Last year, 26.5 per cent of mothers were aged 35 years and older, compared with 10.7 per cent in 1993.

— with files from Global News’ Touria Izri

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India has reported its first case of the new Clade 1b strain of the mpox virus in the southern state of Kerala, according to media reports.

“Health Minister Veena George urged caution after a Mpox case confirmed in Kerala. Airport surveillance has been stepped up, and travellers from affected countries must report any symptoms. Sample collection and treatment are ensured,” the state government said last week in a post on the social media platform X.

In a Facebook post, George confirmed the person who tested positive was a 38-year-old man who had recently travelled to India from the United Arab Emirates. He was admitted to a government hospital in Mallapuram, George said.

Indian media outlets said George, speaking in Malayam to reporters, confirmed the case belonged to the new clade 1b strain. Reuters confirmed this, citing sources within the Indian Health Ministry.

Reuters said Health Ministry spokesperson Manisha Verma confirmed the strain after Indian news agency ANI cited official sources as saying the mpox case reported in the Malappuram district of Kerala last week belonged to clade 1.

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About 29 friends and family members of the patient along with 37 passengers on his flight are being monitored at home but none of them have shown any mpox symptoms so far, Shubin C, a local official with Malappuram district, told Reuters on Monday.

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Indian authorities had issued an advisory this month to all states to remain vigilant and be prepared to address potential cases.

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global health emergency on Aug. 14 after the new strain of the virus, which was first identified in the Democratic Republic of Congo, began spreading to countries in the region.

India has been on alert about the virus since the WHO’s declaration.

The country had already reported 30 cases of the older clade 2 strain until March this year, with one additional case being reported this month.

“As per the present assessment, the risk of a large outbreak with sustained transmission is low,” the health ministry had said in a statement last month after the WHO’s declaration.

Two strains of mpox are now spreading in Congo: the endemic form of the virus, clade 1, and the new clade 1b strain, with the term “clade” referring to a form of the virus.

Mpox transmits through close physical contact, including sexual contact, but unlike previous global pandemics such as COVID-19, there is no evidence it spreads easily through the air.

It typically causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions and is usually mild but can kill.

In her Facebook post last week, Veena George urged anyone experiencing symptoms to seek treatment immediately.

— with files from Reuters

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Police in northern Switzerland said Tuesday that several people have been arrested and a criminal case has been opened in connection with the suspected death of a person in a so-called “suicide pod.”

The “Sarco” pod has been in the works for years, but up until now has never been used.

The Sarco pods — short for sarcophogus — allow a person to control their death inside the pod by quickly reducing internal oxygen levels. The person intending to end their life is required to answer a set of pre-recorded questions, then press a button that floods the interior with nitrogen. The oxygen level inside is quickly reduced from 21 per cent to one per cent, and the person is supposed to fall asleep and die by suffocation in a matter of minutes.

After death, the pod can be used as a coffin.

Prosecutors in Schaffhausen canton were informed by a law firm that an “assisted suicide” involving the Sarco had taken place Monday near a forest cabin in Merishausen, regional police said in a statement. They said “several people” were taken into custody and prosecutors opened an investigation on suspicion of inciting, and aiding and abetting suicide.

It’s reported that officers recovered the device and a body at the scene.

Swiss law allows assisted suicide so long as the person takes his or her life with no “external assistance” and those who help the person die do not do so for “any self-serving motive,” according to a government website.

Currently, assisted suicide in Switzerland means swallowing a capsule filled with a cocktail of controlled substances that puts the person into a deep coma before they die.

0:51
Suicide pods now legal in Switzerland, providing users with a painless death

Switzerland, unlike some other countries including the Netherlands, does not allow euthanasia, which sees health-care practitioners inject patients with lethal drugs at their request and under specific conditions.

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There are a number of organizations in the country that are dedicated to helping people end their lives and they allow foreigners to enter their country to legally kill themselves. There has been much criticism from lawmakers that the Swiss rules surrounding assisted suicide are unclear and full of legal loopholes.

Exit International, an assisted suicide organization in the Netherlands behind the development of the Sarco pod, said in a statement that a 64-year-old American woman with “severe immune compromise” died Monday near the German border in one of its devices.

It said Florian Willet, co-president of The Last Resort, a Swiss affiliate of Exit International, was the only person present and described her death as “peaceful, fast and dignified.”

In July, The Last Resort said it anticipated the Sarco pod would be used for the first time this year.

Also in that month, Swiss newspaper Blick reported that Peter Sticher, a state prosecutor in Schaffhausen, wrote to Exit International’s lawyers saying any operator of the suicide capsule could face criminal proceedings if it was used there — and any conviction could bring up to five years in prison.

In other Swiss regions, prosecutors have also indicated that use of the suicide capsule could lead to prosecution.

Previously, Dr. Philip Nitschke, the developer of the pods and founder of Exit International, told SwissInfo.ch the machines can be “towed anywhere for the death” and one of the most positive features of the capsules is that they can be transported to an “idyllic outdoor setting.”

“We want to remove any kind of psychiatric review from the process and allow the individual to control the method themselves,” Nitschke said in 2021. “Our aim is to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity. Naturally, there is a lot of skepticism, especially on the part of psychiatrists.”

“The benefit for the person who uses it is that they don’t have to get any permission, they don’t need some special doctor to try and get a needle in, and they don’t need to get difficult drugs,” Nitschke said in a 2020 demonstration of the device.

In a 2018 personal essay for HuffPost, Nitschke said his focus in the realm of assisted suicide has shifted over the years “from supporting the idea of a dignified death for the terminally ill (the medical model) to supporting the concept of a good death for any rational adult who has ‘life experience’ (the human rights model).”

“Time and again, we see the comfort and reassurance that is gained from knowing one has an ‘exit plan,’ so to speak, within reach, should the need ever arise. Being in control gives confidence. It restores one’s sense of self. And, yes, it generates dignity in living, knowing one will have dignity in dying,” he wrote.

Nitschke added that people who use the capsule will not feel any type of suffocation or choking in the low-oxygen environment. Rather, they will “feel their best.”

In the Exit International statement on Tuesday, Nitschke said he was “pleased that the Sarco had performed exactly as it had been designed … to provide an elective, non-drug, peaceful death at the time of the person’s choosing.”

On Monday, Health Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider was asked in Swiss parliament about the legal conditions for the use of the Sarco capsule, and suggested its use would not be legal.

“On one hand, it does not fulfil the demands of the product safety law, and as such, must not be brought into circulation,” she said. “On the other hand, the corresponding use of nitrogen is not compatible with the article on purpose in the chemicals law.”

Over the summer, a 54-year-old U.S. woman with multiple health ailments had planned to be the first person to use the device, but those plans were abandoned.

— With files from The Associated Press

—

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If you or someone you know is in crisis and needs help, resources are available. In case of an emergency, please call 911 for immediate help.

For immediate mental health support, call 988. For a directory of support services in your area, visit the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention at suicideprevention.ca.

Learn more about preventing suicide with these warning signs and tips on how to help.

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One of every five pieces of seafood bought from a Calgary restaurant or grocer was mislabelled at best or an entirely different species than what was claimed on the packaging, a new study published Monday finds.

The latest study in what’s been a long-identified trend across Canada has major implications for consumers’ health and wallets, as well as for the protection of endangered species, one of the study’s authors tells Global News.

“There’s no way for you as the consumer to have any idea if what you bought is what you got when you’re buying sushi. And that’s just the sad reality of it right now,” says Matthew Morris, associate professor of biology at Ambrose University in Calgary.

The problem is wider than your favourite all-you-can-eat sushi joint, according to the study published Monday in PeerJ’s biodiversity and conservation journal.

Students from Ambrose, which describes itself as a private Christian liberal arts university, worked with peers at Mount Royal University and the University of Calgary between 2014 and 2020 to sample a variety of seafood at grocers and restaurants in the city and cross reference their “DNA barcode” with what was on the label.

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The results found that roughly one in five products were mislabelled to the point where the wrong species was substituted for what was sold. That includes both invertebrates such as shrimp, oysters and octopus as well as finfish like cod or salmon.

Misidentification rates were slightly higher, around one in three, when “semantic mislabelling” was included — a broader classification where an inaccurate label was used on something like “freshwater eel,” but consumers were likely still getting some form of eel.

But Morris explains that the most egregious instances are when a student purchased a cut of Atlantic salmon, only to find they had received rainbow trout that was manipulated to give its flesh the same pink colour as salmon.

“In a case like that, you’ve been genuinely hoodwinked,” he says.

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For some species of fish, Morris says the mislabelling is far more widespread. In “virtually every” example of red snapper samples sold, the actual product is typically tilapia, he says. That’s because red snapper is getting more rare in the wild while tilapia is cheaper and more easily farmed.

Getting a cheaper fillet than what you paid for is the tip of the iceberg, Morris warns. If someone is eating a piece of seafood they’re not expecting to be high in mercury, it can have major implications for someone who might be pregnant and is supposed to avoid it in their diet, he says.

In one particularly worrisome case researchers came across, a species of tuna sold at a sushi restaurant was in fact escolar, a fish that produces a form of fatty acid linked to gastrointestinal distress that has landed it the dubious distinction as the “laxative of the sea.”

“Some people have landed in the hospital because they’ve eaten too much of this particular product,” Morris says. “So at an all-you-can-eat-sushi bar, that’s not the thing that you want to be encountering.”

The other concerns are largely conservational in nature, particularly if a cut is sold as a thriving member of the marine ecosystem but is in fact a protected species.

Morris says landlocked Calgary was one of the few major markets not yet studied for mislabelling, but he suspects the team’s estimates are “conservative.” Previous studies have shown even higher rates of misidentification, he notes.

A 2017 study from advocacy group Oceana Canada found that nearly half (46 per cent) of the seafood sampled from Ottawa vendors was mislabelled; a follow-up study the next year covering five Canadian cities found similar rates (44 per cent) of misidentification. A 2021 Oceana Canada study looking at Montreal found labels were wrong 60 per cent of the time.

But it’s not just a Canadian problem, with similar rates of misidentification seen in the United States and globally. Researchers in Hawaii had similar findings to Calgary’s, with one in five products in a 2020 study found to be mislabelled.

Morris says the United Nations has led initiatives to improve regulations around traceability in recent years, implementing a tracking system that can see some consumers scan a QR code on their packaging to see where a particular fish was caught and learn more information that way.

The Calgary researchers don’t have data during the depths of the pandemic and its aftermath, so they say more study is needed to see if labelling practices have improved in recent years.

Canadian rules do cite traceability in their requirements, but Morris feels that asking suppliers to keep better records does not go as far as electronically tagging and tracking the path of fish from the water to the table.

2:05
Seafood products being mislabeled in Canada

“For the general consumer, when you go to the grocery store to buy a seafood product, you have no way of knowing if that product is what you think it is,” Morris says.

That said, there are a few tips Morris has to identify whether “what you bought is what you got.”

For one, he recommends buying “head-on” fish — seeing the full package, in other words, can help to reduce instances of buying the wrong seafood.

Checking the package for certification by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) means the product was harvested sustainability and is also “far less likely to be mislabelled,” Morris says.

At a restaurant, Morris says it’s hard to see what package a fish comes out of before it’s cooked and plated, even with some sushi or hibachi restaurants where meals are prepared in direct line of sight.

But as a general rule, he also recommends not buying fish with very generalized labels like “tuna,” “salmon,” or “fish and chips.” A specific label like Atlantic or sockeye salmon is more likely to adhere to the species, he says.

“You would never go to the grocery store and buy a bird salad or a mammal sandwich. So don’t purchase something with a vague label,” he says.

— with files from Global News’ Anne Gaviola

4:41
Toxic shellfish warning

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The head brewmaster for Weihenstephan, the world’s oldest brewery, has a secret: He really likes alcohol-free beer.

Even though he’s quick to say he obviously enjoys real beer more, Tobias Zollo says he savors alcohol-free beer when he’s working or eating lunch. It has the same taste but fewer calories than a soft drink, he said, thanks to the brewery’s process of evaporating the alcohol.

“You can’t drink beer every day — unfortunately,” he joked last week at the Bavarian state brewery in the German town of Freising, about 31 kilometers (19.26 miles) north of Munich.

Zollo isn’t alone in his appreciation for the sober beverage. Alcohol-free beer has been gaining popularity in recent years as beer consumption shrinks.

At Weihenstephan, which was founded as a brewery in 1040 by Benedictine monks, non-alcoholic wheat beer and lager now make up 10% of the volume. The increase over the last few years, since they started making alcohol-free drinks in the 1990s, mirrors the statistics for the rest of Germany’s beer industry.

“The people are unfortunately — I have to say that as a brewer — unfortunately drinking less beer,” Zollo said Friday, the day before Oktoberfest officially started. “If there’s an alternative to have the crisp and fresh taste from a typical Weihenstephan beer, but just as a non-alcoholic version, we want to do that.”

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Even at Oktoberfest — arguably the world’s most famous ode to alcohol — alcohol-free beer is on the menu.

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All but two of the 18 large tents at the festival offer the drink through the celebration’s 16 days. The sober beverage will cost drinkers the same as an alcoholic beer — between 13.60 and 15.30 euros ($15.12 and $17.01) for a 1-liter mug (33 fluid ounces) — but save them from a hangover.

“For people who don’t like to drink alcohol and want to enjoy the Oktoberfest as well, I think it’s a good option,” Mikael Caselitz, 24, of Munich said Saturday inside one of the tents. “Sometimes people feel like they have more fun with alcohol, which is not a good thing because you can also have fun without alcohol.”

He added: “If you want to come and drink alcohol-free beer, nobody will judge you.”

This year marked the first time an alcohol-free beer garden opened in Munich. “Die Null,” which means “the zero” in German, served non-alcoholic beer, mocktails and other alcohol-free drinks near the city’s main train station this summer but was scheduled to close a few day before Oktoberfest opened.

Walter König, managing director of the Society of Hop Research north of Munich, said researchers have had to breed special hops varieties for alcohol-free beer. If brewers use the typical hops for alcohol-free beer, the distinct aroma gets lost when the alcohol is reduced during the brewing process.

But customers don’t care about that, König said Friday as he prepared for Oktoberfest.

“They only want to know that what they are tasting is as good as traditional beers with alcohol,” he said.

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New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to inaugurate antibiotic Penicillin-G plant in Andhra Pradesh, three decades after the country’s last plant shut down.

Industry executives told ET that decks have been cleared for Hyderabad based Aurobindo Pharma to begin production of Penicillin G at their plant at Kakinada in AP.

The company has started producing small batches and will begin full scale production of 300 metric tonnes towards the end of this year, the sources said.

Penicillin G is used in making several antibiotics. India stopped producing Pen-G about three decades ago and has been dependent on China for them.

The Penicillin-G (Pen-G) facility, located in a SEZ at Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh, has a production capacity of 15,000 tonne per annum and also 1.8 lakh tonne of glucose, while 6-Amino Penicillanic Acid plant has a capacity to produce 3,600 tonne annually, the drug maker had earlier said in a statement.

The company said that Penicillin G, Glucose, 6-APA and granulated products will be for captive use, domestic supply and exports, while a vials/ampoules plant will be for export markets.

People in the industry said about 30,000 metric tonnes of penicillin is imported from China.

“China ensured closure of production in the entire world, including India, on account of huge government support in terms of subsidies, infrastructure support, ease of doing business (EODB) in the regulatory landscape, and cheap labour,” an expert said.

In 2021 the government initiated a PLI scheme for boosting domestic manufacturing of APIs or KSMs (key starting materials), widening its scope to encourage exports of these raw materials for drug makers.

The scheme was announced for crucial fermentation products, including penicillin g, Aphalosporanic acid 7-aca (used for making antimicrobial drugs), clavulanic acid (to treat bacterial infections), and erythromycin thiocyanate (anti-infectives). India’s pharmaceuticals industry is the third largest in the world, but is dependent on China for crucial raw materials.

The PLI scheme seeks to reduce this dependency and ensure adequate domestic supply of bulk drugs and APIs, industry executives said.

Along with this Mumbai-based Kinvan Pvt Ltd has also started producing clavulanic acid, a blockbuster active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) that goes into making Augmentin antibiotic.