‘It's very busy': Wildlife injured in Manitoba fires finding refuge
Staff at Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre treat a nighthawk with an eye injury on Tuesday June 10, 2025. (Joseph Bernacki/CTV News Winnipeg)
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CTV News
36 minutes ago
- CTV News
‘It's not easy living with scleroderma': Raising awareness about a rare autoimmune disease
A Nova Scotia woman knows first-hand how tough it is to live with scleroderma. It's a condition referred to as the 'hard word disease.' While many people may have never heard of scleroderma, it impacts thousands of people. About one in 2,500 Canadians live with some form of the disease, including Michelle Richard from Nova Scotia. 'What it was like at the beginning was a whole lot different than what it's like today. So, in the beginning, I was quite ill with the disease, and so I think there was this almost a survival mode coming into that,' said Richard. 'I ended up on dialysis. There were a lot of issues, but slowly I started to recover from that and then adjusted to a new normal as a lot of us in our community say.' She was diagnosed 25 years ago, and at the time, she didn't think she would still be here today. 'You can have five to 10 years depending on the severity, and because I was quite severe, it was like, 'OK, well, get things in order,' but surprise! Here I am. I turned 60 and I'm grateful to have been able to reach that milestone,' she said. Scleroderma, which literally means hard skin, is a rare autoimmune disease that causes the body to produce too much collagen. 'It's very hard to describe,' said Scleroderma Atlantic president Jason Doucette. It can affect people of all ages, races, and gender, but it is more common in women between the ages of 30 and 50. 'It can be an invisible and it can be a visible disease,' said Doucette. 'Visibly you can have your digits or your fingers really crumpled up for example. You can have a tightened mouth, tightened skin, or it can be invisible. So, it can affect your internal organs, your kidneys, your heart, your lungs, all of that.' Doucette first got involved with Scleroderma Atlantic in 2013. His mother was initially diagnosed with Raynaud's phenomenon which further progressed to scleroderma. She passed away in 2012. 'After she passed away, I decided to look up the scleroderma organization and came to their first walk here in 2013, and I just loved the organization. It was a small community, and I just wanted to get involved and give back,' he said. June is Scleroderma Awareness Month, and Scleroderma Atlantic has been hosting its Make a Move fundraisers in cities across the region. 'It's not easy living with scleroderma, but June is a time for us to be able to come together, to connect and learn from each other,' said Doucette. Richard is grateful to have such a supportive community – one that is always ready to welcome more people. 'The Nova Scotia community has really developed, and we've been able to spread out to P.E.I. and New Brunswick and Newfoundland,' she said. 'We want people to know that we're here, and that you don't have to be alone. We're here. We'll help you, and we'll help you when you're ready.' Make a Move for Scleroderma takes place at DeWolf Park in Bedford, N.S., on Saturday. Organizers hope to raise $30,000. The money will go toward supporting the physical, mental and financial health of those living with the disease. For more Nova Scotia news, visit our dedicated provincial page
CBC
36 minutes ago
- CBC
2 deaths linked to insect bites in Quebec — but experts say no reason to panic
Insect-borne diseases are becoming increasingly common in southern parts of the province, with climate change playing a part.
Globe and Mail
43 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
Islet cell transplant trial outcome ‘major milestone' toward cure for diabetes
When Amanda Smith learned at the age of 25 that she had late-onset Type 1 diabetes, she considered the diagnosis a death sentence. The nurse, from London, Ont., had a particularly dim view of the disease because she grew up watching her mother struggle with it. Her mother would slur her words and lose consciousness when her blood sugar bottomed out. Once, Ms. Smith's grandfather had to break a window to reach her mother, who was passed out in her home holding a banana she had tried to consume to raise her blood sugar. 'It literally eats you from the inside out,' said Ms. Smith, now 36. 'It rots your teeth, it destroys your body, your vision. The complications that come with Type 1 diabetes are so extreme.' Ms. Smith is confident now that those complications won't be in her future. In February of 2023, she became the first Canadian to receive a transplant of islet cells – the cells in the pancreas that make insulin – derived from embryonic stem cells. The transplant freed her from insulin and gave her blood sugar control akin to a non-diabetic. It was performed at Toronto General Hospital, the institution where insulin was first tested more than 100 years ago. On Friday, the results of the clinical trial in which Ms. Smith participated were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The early-phase trial was small, and the procedure has a significant downside in that patients must take anti-rejection drugs for life, just like recipients of organ transplants. For people living with diabetes, the push for medical coverage isn't political, it's personal Nonetheless, the study's outcome counts as 'spectacular,' according to James Shapiro, who holds the Canada Research Chair in transplant surgery and regenerative medicine at the University of Alberta and was not involved in the study. Ten of the 12 participants who received a full dose of the cells were insulin-independent one year later. 'This is a major advance and a major milestone along the journey towards a cure,' he said. Dr. Shapiro was himself responsible for an earlier breakthrough on that path. In 2000, he and his colleagues at the University of Alberta published a seminal paper on a method they developed for safely and effectively transplanting islet cells from deceased donors into patients with Type 1 diabetes. They dubbed their regimen the 'Edmonton Protocol.' 'We used to call it the drive-through transplant,' Dr. Shapiro said, because giving patients islet cells was less risky and burdensome than a whole pancreas transplant. The cells are infused into patients under mild sedation with an IV-drip into the portal vein of the liver. The breakthrough described in the new paper is that the islet cells transplanted into Ms. Smith were derived not from deceased donors but from embryonic stem cells, which function as a type of source code that scientists can coax into becoming any cell in the human body. The supply of such lab-created islets could, in theory, be limitless, unlike the supply of deceased donor islets. Semaglutide, or Ozempic, reduces symptoms of feared diabetes' complication, study finds Trevor Reichman, director of the pancreas and islet transplant program at the University Health Network's Ajmera Transplant Centre, said the most encouraging result is that the islet-cell transplants eliminated dangerous blood sugar 'lows' that can cause confusion, seizures and unconsciousness. He ran the study site at UHN and is an author of the new paper. 'All of them, essentially, were able to get rid of their hypoglycemic episodes,' Dr. Reichman said, 'so all of the real risks to them, all of the lows, were essentially eliminated.' Still, the international trial, funded by Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals, wasn't without its challenges. The company paused it temporarily last year after two participants died, though not from taking Zimislecel, the brand name of the new islet therapy. Vertex expects to apply for regulatory approval of Zimislecel starting next year. One participant died of severe dementia 30 months after the infusion. That patient had pre-existing neurocognitive impairment and, before joining the trial, had suffered a brain injury during a motor-vehicle accident caused by a severe blood sugar low. The other died of cryptococcal meningitis, a fungal infection caused by a sinus surgery. The death was related to the immunosuppressant medication that the participant was taking to preserve the islet transplant, the study said. That death underscores the tradeoff that people with Type 1 diabetes would have to make with Zimislecel, said Rémi Rabasa-Lhoret, director of the Metabolic Diseases Research Unit and The Diabetes Clinic at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute. He wonders how many people with Type 1 would be willing to take anti-rejection drugs for life, especially now that advances such as insulin pumps have made diabetes easier to manage for some patients. 'It's probably going to be a very narrow population,' Dr. Rabasa-Lhoret said. The next step for scientists is finding a way to genetically engineer or encapsulate islets so the immune system won't view them as hostile invaders. In the meantime, Ms. Smith said taking three pills, three times a day to suppress her immune system is a breeze compared with the round-the-clock work of keeping her blood sugar in check. Her 10-year-old daughter, Draya, used to say she wanted to become a doctor to cure diabetes. Now, she talks of being a pilot or engineer. 'I would do this a million times over compared to the maintenance I used to have to do to keep myself alive,' Ms. Smith said.
