Mlle

“When you are not prioritizing accessibility, you are excluding people, whether you realize it or not.”

Saw a patient today with a hemoglobin of 1.9 g/dL. For context, a level that low is almost incompatible with normal consciousness, but she walked right into the clinic on her own feet. For three long years, she lived with crushing weakness and since last 6 months breathlessness from just walking across a room. Why didn’t she get help sooner? At first, it was because the kids had crucial school exams and later her husband was reluctant to deal with the hassle of a hospital admission. Her health was treated as a background inconvenience. When we dug deeper, it got worse. A year ago, her Hb was 6.4 g/dL. A doctor explicitly told them she needed immediate admission. The family refused, walked out with a basic strip of iron tablets, she took them for two weeks, forgot about them, and nobody in the house ever bothered to check on her or remind her. She didn't even come to the hospital today because of the air hunger. She came because her periods had completely stopped for months. Her body was so profoundly starved of iron and oxygen that it literally shut down her reproductive axis just to divert what little blood she had left to her heart and brain. It’s completely heartbreaking. A woman will literally bleed her body dry, gasp for air for years and keep working silently, only to be brought to a doctor when her normal functioning stops. Please check on the women in your homes. Stop letting them normalize chronic exhaustion.

4 days later one Canadian tested positive The crew are not happy Understandably so They feel they were given substandard PPE & bad advice

Recall that Henry argued in spring 2020 that asymptomatic/presymptomatic transmission of SARS2 wasn't likely. We've since learned that she was wrong, and that people without symptoms account for perhaps as much as 50% of cases. We don't have to keep relearning these hard lessons.

WARNING: This excellent article about Andes Hantavirus doesn’t have a single line of calm-mongering bullcrap.

No “calm-mongering” by Dr. Donald Vinh, medical microbiologist & ID physician at McGill. Bonus points for naming it, Andes hantavirus “spreads from person to person through droplets & aerosols”. ctvnews.ca/video/2026/05/…

“Personal Protective Equipment, PPE, that word we all dread...” I’m sorry, what? What a ridiculous thing to say. I can understand dreading diseases & other dangerous pathogens… …but why on earth would anyone sensible dread the equipment designed to protect & keep them safe?

Someone who dreads essential medical equipment should not be working in healthcare. Full stop. She should be dismissed faster than the speed of light.

I was absolutely appalled to hear Bonnie Henry say "Personal Protective Equipment, the word we all dread". You may have had an instant visceral reaction to that yourself, but here are the eleven things wrong with what she said:

If you dread PPE, you have no business in medicine or public health. You don’t hear people speak this way about helmets, seatbelts or condoms. It’s only PPE for airborne viruses that folks take an issue with. Their unwillingness to promote the right tools will kill people.

2/ Importantly, transmission is not limited to close contacts or prolonged exposures, as demonstrated in a 2020 study of the 2018 Argentina outbreak, and airborne precautions should be implemented. nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…

@RobynUrback This is under the assumption Canadian health officials know what they’re doing. These are the same Canadians that said COVID will not be a pandemic. Hantavirus is airborne. And quite infectious. It has an incubation of 8 weeks meaning cases come slow. But they are there. Period.

@RobynUrback @Lizzardo77 Literally me screaming this at my phone when I read the CBC article earlier. The reporter wrote so many contradictory things, regurgitating the press conference with no objectivity or questioning of the accuracy or logic of the statements.

@RobynUrback Ontario is still using medical masks for potentially exposed patients. This is the same guidance for measles and covid which are also #Airborne. x.com/TdotMum/status…

Or, I don’t know, treated it as airborne just in case? nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…

Public health officials keep saying this strain requires “prolonged close contact” for transmission. When these people disembarked, Canadian public health said they had no known direct contact with anyone infected. So, uh, shouldn’t the assumption about transmission change?

Never assume the people in charge know what they're doing. Never assume they'll learn from their mistakes. These are lessons i learned in 2020.

We're in a weird era where a guy gets publicly shamed for running his sprinklers on a Tuesday, while a data center the size of a Costco quietly drains a reservoir so AI can generate a picture of your cat as a medieval knight. And the data center gets a tax incentive for it.

@ONRedaktion @Shabou52 @BirdieBittern Mt. Sinai used to mask when treating cabbage patch dolls

SARS-CoV-2 directly infects the inner ear in a mouse model and causes hearing dysfunction #LongCovid cell.com/cell-reports/f…

Make no mistake: destroying world-class universities, like the US just did with Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, isn't just an attack on Iran but it's literally an attack on all of us, on all of humanity. It's not Iran that "won" when Maryam Mirzakhani made her discoveries that won her a Fields Medal: it's all of mathematics, and everything mathematics is used for. Human progress won, technology won, we all won. It's the same type of stuff the Mongols did during the sack of Baghdad and their destruction of the House of Wisdom: we ALL lost something irreplaceable back then, entire fields of human knowledge set back. That's what bombing a university does. It doesn't just destroy buildings. It destroys us, all of us.