I have posted my letter to the Minister of Primary and Preventive Health Care strongly recommending that the Novavax Fall 2026 COVID vaccine, a non-mRNA vaccine, as well as the mRNA vaccines, be made available to all Albertans free of charge. PLEASE, PLEASE, my fellow Albertans, send supporting correspondence to the same minister in massive volume. Here is the website address: alberta.ca/contact-a-cabinet… My letter is below: Dear Minister: As a physician involved in the care of a LARGE NUMBER of Long COVID patients and an immunocompromised, disabled Albertan myself, I strongly recommend that the Alberta ministry of Health make available to all residents of this province FREE OF CHARGE the fall 2026 Novavax COVID vaccine as an alternative to either the Pfizer or Moderna COVID vaccine.  These have already been paid for with Albertans' taxes. I expect that this strong recommendation will be expedited in an open, transparent fashion with extensive communication. Leslie A. Kasza MD FRCPC

A 95 y.o. friend has Norovirus right now. Mutual friend read and shared an article about how contagious it is. All in their circle agreed that this was serious and should be taken seriously. None of them mask. None of them will read or share an article about... that other virus.

We're so fucked.. Not many are taking the GOA Jobs.. and the fact they're being barred from working in the province? I can see Sask, Manitoba & BC trying to get them quite quickly!

Full paper here: Bin Liu, ChengFang Yang, Jingyu Zhu, Xiaowei Guo, Jie Luan, Jianbo Ba, Hantavirus outbreak on cruise ship: public health challenges, Biosafety and Health, 2026, Aerosol transmission drove Hantavirus spread on the cruise ship. sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

"Cruise ship confined spaces and HVAC systems facilitated 👉aerosol👈 transmission." We will accept apologies now from the Droplet Dogma gang. And @WHO. Soutce: Hantavirus outbreak on cruise ship: public health challenges. Biosafety and Health, Jun 2026,

Saw an interesting post the other day referencing AI token prices that said something along the lines of when China sells something it tends to stay at that cheap price or go down, and make those things more available and affordable to everyone (EVs, cellphones, solar panels, AI, etc) and in the West when something is cheap it's just until they destroy competition and existing alternatives, then they jack up the prices as high as then can. Nothing stays affordable. It's always just to capture market share. Been thinking a lot about that.

Ever been the only sober person in the room? Notice how easy it is to know when anyone else is even only slightly drunk? But when you’re drinking with them, their drunkenness doesn’t register? (Avoiding COVID infections whilst being witness to everyone else’s brain damage)

Neat little in-car Far-UVC system. Not sure about the output power though. One of the install clips shows a few of them which seems more realistic.

Sharing a bright spot in case anyone really needs it right now.

Look who is the head of the new committee! cbc.ca/news/health/canada-pr…

Yep, same. For what it’s worth I have a fantastic CC dentist in the Seattle area (we travel 3 hours north 2x a year for this care).

Hey everyone. Here's Alan providing people with the link to the petition to recall his article. DO NOT leave him hanging. Sign it.

Rant: Several sets of relatives are taking big trips without even considering health precautions, while I'm frantically scheming/planning how to get CC dental care for my my family. Life isn't fair. And knowing my luck, the relatives will likely escape unscathed, but I won't.

It took over 14 months, but Rodney Taylor has finally been released from ICE custody. A disabled double amputee, his health declined considerably in the camps. What was done to Rodney should have caused worldwide uproar … yet almost no one told his story. We must do better.

I had one of those really horrible conversations last week with someone who has had a string of new gut and bowel problems in the last year. Every moment of the conversation a new alarm bell went off. I came home and checked the charts.

$90M 6 schools or 24,000 knee surgeries. And what are we wasting this money on? Asking questions we can't implement the answers too or whether we should ask a question. Where did all the fiscal conservatives go?? I think we can take the C out of UCP...

I'm a cardiologist. A 42-year-old mother of two came to my office complaining of jaw pain and crushing fatigue. She ran half-marathons. Her EKG was normal. Another doctor had sent her home with anxiety medication. When I got her into the cath lab, I found severe microvascular disease — plaque choking the tiniest vessels of her heart, the ones standard angiograms routinely miss. Her heart had been starving in silence while everyone told her she was stressed. She is alive today. Too many women like her are not. Heart disease kills more women than every cancer combined. And medicine is still diagnosing it through a male lens. 84% of cardiologists report having patients in the past year whose heart disease was misdiagnosed by another physician. Women with a STEMI heart attack have a 59% greater chance of being misdiagnosed compared to men. Women with an NSTEMI — 41% greater chance. The reason is structural. For decades, we screened, tested, and treated women using a template built for men. Men's heart attacks announce themselves — the crushing chest pain, the clutched fist, the Hollywood collapse. Women's hearts whisper. Crushing fatigue that feels like wearing a lead vest. Jaw pain written off as TMJ. Nausea blamed on a stomach bug. An ache between the shoulder blades blamed on a long week. Shortness of breath blamed on being out of shape. For years, medicine called these "atypical" symptoms. They are not atypical. They are female-typical. Half of humanity is not a variant. And the biology runs deeper than symptoms. Women have smaller hearts and narrower coronary arteries. Plaque doesn't only clog the big highway vessels — it hides in the microvasculature, the tiny branches feeding the heart muscle itself. A woman can have a heart attack with a completely "clean" standard angiogram. SCAD — spontaneous coronary artery dissection — occurs 90% of the time in women. Often young, fit women with zero traditional risk factors. It's the leading cause of heart attack in women under 50, accounting for roughly one quarter of all cases in that age group. Most doctors have never diagnosed one. And some of the most dangerous cardiac risk factors are hidden in women's medical histories where no one thinks to look: Preeclampsia or gestational hypertension doubles to quadruples lifetime heart disease and stroke risk. Pregnancy is the body's first cardiac stress test — and these complications are early warning sirens, not closed chapters. Autoimmune disease — lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis — far more common in women, turbocharges inflammation and plaque formation at any age. Cardiovascular disease in women aged 20-44 is projected to surge nearly 50% by 2050. The youngest patients in my practice keep getting younger. What every woman should ask her doctor — and what every doctor should be asking: "Given my pregnancy history, autoimmune status, and family history — what is my full cardiovascular risk?" If they don't ask about preeclampsia or gestational diabetes, volunteer it. "Should I have an Lp(a) test and a coronary calcium score?" Standard cholesterol panels miss too much. Lp(a) is genetic, one-time, and most women have never been tested. "My tests came back normal but my symptoms haven't stopped — what's next?" Normal stress tests and angiograms can miss microvascular disease, spasm, and SCAD. Persistent symptoms warrant coronary CT angiography or cardiac MRI. And if something feels wrong — say these exact words to your doctor: "I am concerned this could be my heart." That single sentence changes the workup. Do not soften it. Do not apologize for it. 80% of heart disease is preventable. But the playbook has to be built for female biology. Two decades ago, I wrote one of the first books warning that heart disease was the number one killer of women and that medicine was diagnosing it through a male lens. It was recognized by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House during the early years of the national conversation about women's heart health. I'm haunted by how much of that book I could republish today unchanged. The science has advanced. The awareness has grown. But the gap between what we know and what happens in the exam room is still costing women their lives. Share this with every woman you love — and every doctor who treats them. READ MORE: open.substack.com/pub/afshin…

Random tip about mosquito bed nets: It’s easy to put a hole in them, so always have an emergency repair kit on hand. I recommend thread. Gather a handful of net including the hole and wind thread around the base of the bundle, then tie. Bandaids or duct tape don’t work.

I remember the year in university when I realised that it's quite difficult to play a practical joke that doesn't cause peripheral, unintended harm. "Harmless fun" is an elusive concept. Seems relevant today. Most people refuse to consider that their fun could kill someone.