People reached into their pockets, tightened their shoes and added a little extra oil to their bike chains Sunday to help remember Canadian icon Terry Fox.Longtime organizer Alec Wallace has been involved in organizing the Meaford event for 25 years.”We average about 100 participants and $13,000 from the run a year,” he told the Meaford Express.”More than $300,000 has been raised in the last 25 years,” Wallace said.

In 2010, Canadians donated $28 million to cancer research by participating in approximately 800 Terry Fox Runs and other events.Wallace said the run attracted more participants at one time, but the popularity of school runs has reduced the number that turn out for the formal Sunday run these days.

By Sunday, more than $5,000 had been raised through donations to the run site. Another $1,500 had been raised through online pledges.Wallace said his brother-in-law died of cancer years ago and thats his inspiration for the time hes lavished on the event.

via Simcoe Article: Succesful Terry Fox Run.

The percentage of the Canadian population that smokes cigarettes has been dropping steadily since anti-smoking efforts began in earnest in the 1970s. In 1965, 49 per cent of Canadians over the age of 15 smoked. Sixty-one per cent of males smoked while 38 per cent of females indulged in the habit.

The latest Statistics Canada figures show smoking rates are fairly stable. In 2010, 20.8 per cent of Canadians aged 12 and over — about six million people — were smokers. Five years ago, there were 5.9 million smokers or 22 per cent of the population. In 2003, 23 per cent of Canadians aged 12 or older, smoked.

Canadian smokers at a glance

People age 18 to 34 form the highest proportion of smokers, at 28 per cent.

More men than women smoke. In 2010, 24.2 per cent of males and 17.4 per cent of females smoked. That’s a jump from the 22.6 per cent of men who smoked a year earlier — and about the same as the rate in 2008. The percentage of women who smoked in 2010 remained about the same in 2010 and 2009, but was down significantly from the 18.5 per cent who smoked in 2008.

In 2009, smoking rates were lowest in British Columbia and Ontario, at 16 per cent and 18.6 per cent. That compares to 20.5 per cent and 24.5 per cent in those provinces in 2000.

Smoking rates in the territories are high: 35.5 per cent in Yukon, 35.7 per cent in Northwest Territories and 61.3 per cent in Nunavut. Smoking rates rose in Nunavut and Yukon in the first decade of this century.

Overall, the percentage of Canadians over the age of 12 fell by 22 per cent between 2000 and 2009.

Smoking facts and figures

The lowest smoking rates are among youths aged 12-15 (three per cent) and seniors (9.6 per cent).

Almost 60 per cent of senior non-smokers are former smokers. Just under 11 per cent of non-smokers between the ages of 12 and 19 are former smokers.

In 2009, just over 50 per cent of people between the ages of 20 and 24 had never smoked.

via The decline of smoking in Canada – Canada – CBC News.

Calling all chronic pain sufferers…. your voice is needed!!!

This blog has brought about many opportunities for Canadian and International chronic pain sufferers to share their medical and health care experiences. Thankfully this blog is also providing the opportunity for posting upcoming events that allow us the opportunity to be aware of what’s happening, when, where, and how we can help or be involved.

Thanks to an Ontario Tarlov Cyst (TC) Patient, I became aware of the Canadian Pain Summit taking place in Ottawa, Ontario, April 2012.

I will definitely be attending, and I will also be submitting an application to have TC Disease, our rare spinal cord disease, added to the agenda during this summit. Our goal, as always is to bring attention to the horrific lack of care and support found within our Canadian Health Care Programs.

TC Patients in Canada, and around the world, are suffering debilitating and excruciating pain every day and we all deserve better care than what we have been receiving.

So please join me is requesting attention be brought to our illness through the Canadian Pain Summit…. it just may be what we need to let the country know we exist, we suffer and that we know we deserve better from our Provincial and Federal Health Care Program.

I look forward to hearing from you and sharing in your thoughts of how you think we may be able to use forums such as the Chronic Pain Summit to help bring attention to this issue.

We must focus on encouraging change, while also promoting awareness of Rare Spinal Cord Diseases, such as Tarlov Cyst Disease.

Be involved, be part of the solution…… I hope I meet you there…..

If you have any questions, please email me directly at sherri.jones@live.ca
For comments about this post, please submit them below…

http://www.canadianpainsummit2012.ca/en/home/registration-information.aspx

Check this out and click on contribute your voice! TCD needs ours!
Canadians with pain need to speak up!!!

canadiancitizendailybattles.blogspot.com

Mother’s Day last year, I took a pot of orchids to my mom. She hadn’t been feeling well for months. But when I saw her that Sunday, I was shocked. It was plain to me that she was dying.

Mom had had some tests. There was something in her abdomen, and her doctor had obliquely warned us that the news might not good. To get a definitive diagnosis, she needed more tests. That would take more painful rounds of tottering to clinics and doctors’ offices. Her doctor told us that the simplest thing to do was take her to Emergency and get her admitted to the hospital. My mother – a fiercely independent type – was in a lot of pain, so she agreed. “Take these orchids back,” she said. “They won’t be any good to me.”

And that is how my mother became trapped in a system that has no idea how to treat the dying.

Most Canadians say they want to die at home, peacefully, with their families. In fact, most Canadians die in hospital. Far too often, their last weeks are marked by invasive procedures, useless treatment, grossly inadequate pain management and nursing care that runs the gamut from outstanding to callous. Our hospitals are engineered to save people. Yet they are increasingly filled with people who can’t be saved. These people don’t need the latest in high-tech medicine. They need care, compassion and comfort.

It didn’t take long for my mother to receive her diagnosis. She had a particularly nasty form of cancer that had already spread far and wide. Nobody suggested treatment, and Mom didn’t want it. A couple of sympathetic palliative-care doctors showed up to discuss our concerns. “All I want is not to be in pain,” she said. Everybody told her not to worry. They could manage that.

But they didn’t. Mom was on oral medication because she couldn’t manage a pain pump. The pills were administered according to a strict schedule. We would sit with her as she moaned in agony, begging for the next pill, only to be told that it wasn’t time for her medication yet. We complained to everybody we could find. The medication was adjusted, but things didn’t improve. What were they afraid of, we asked ourselves. That she might stop breathing? When she contracted a hospital-based infection, we hoped it would hasten her demise.

Since then, I’ve asked myself many times what else we could have done. Maybe we could have figured out a way to take her home and nurse her there. But we had no idea how to do that. We kept hoping that if we complained enough, it would make a difference.

By now I’ve heard dozens of stories similar to ours – stories of people pleading in vain for effective pain management for their terminally ill loved ones. Some of the people who told me these stories are medical doctors themselves. They had no more influence on the system than we did.

Why are dying people so often left in pain? Ethicist Margaret Somerville says there’s been a serious failure to teach medical students and physicians the latest approaches to pain relief treatment. Veterinarians get better training in pain management than doctors do. Another reason is that, as in most bureaucracies, the system and its rules are more important than the people it’s supposed to serve. The comfort, calm and security of health-care professionals are more important than the well-being of the patients.

Our massively expensive, high-tech acute-care institutions are simply not able to deliver proper palliative care for the dying, even though that is what many of their patients need. As one person who watched her elderly father die in an acute-care hospital writes, “We knew and saw the staff did not have the skills, empathy or training to look after him properly as he journeyed out of this world.” Her brother’s death in palliative care was a different story. “We knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was receiving the kind of care, attention and love that a family provides.” But palliative care is in shockingly short supply.

via The gift of a good death – The Globe and Mail.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, Canadians are asked to pause in memory of the thousands of men and women who sacrificed their lives in military service.

At public gatherings in Ottawa and around the country, Canadians pay tribute with two minutes of silence to the country’s fallen soldiers from the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Afghanistan conflict and peacekeeping missions.

(This Veterans Affairs map shows the gatherings for 2009.)

Also known as Veterans Day in the U.S., Remembrance Day was first held throughout the Commonwealth in 1919. It marks the armistice to end the First World War, which came into effect at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, a year earlier.

It isn’t a national holiday across Canada, but employees in federally regulated employees do get the day off. Several provinces and territories — including Alberta, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan, and Yukon — do observe a statutory holiday.

Canada’s military and the First World War

Two minutes before the armistice went into effect, at 10:58 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, Pte. George Lawrence Price was felled by a bullet. Price would become the final Commonwealth soldier — and the last of more than 66,000 Canadians — to be killed in the First World War

They died fighting at Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele and Ypres — battles remembered for atrocious conditions and Canadian valour. In Ypres, Canadian soldiers were exposed to German gas attacks, yet continued to fight, showing amazing tenacity and courage in the face of danger.

In many ways, the identity of the young country was forged on those bloody battlefields.

About 650,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders (the province then still a colony of Britain) had served during the war, beginning in 1914. The last Canadian veteran of the conflict — John Babcock — died in February 2010 at the age of 109.

After Babcock’s passing, the federal government announced that it would hold a national commemorative ceremony on April 9 to honour all Canadians and Newfoundlanders who served during the First World War.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/11/07/f-remembrance-day.html#ixzz14oNzG600

Struggling to save for a rainy day? You are not alone, according to Canada’s biggest bank.

A new poll released by Royal Bank of Canada on Wednesday found that 57 per cent of Canadians are having trouble setting aside enough savings.

Socking away the cash has become tough because bills and debt are eating up too much of our incomes, RBC said.

About 30 per cent of those surveyed reported having no money left after paying their bills, while 8 per cent admitted to being impulse spenders.

The bank also expressed concern that more than a quarter of respondents were saving less than before, while nearly one-in-five had completely stopped stashing any money over the past two years.

During that time, only 12 per cent of Canadians actually increased their savings, RBC added.

“Our clients tell us that one of the main challenges to saving is paying yourself first — being able to put aside money before it gets spent,” Maria Contreras, product manager, savings accounts at RBC, said in a release.

Like most banks, RBC suggests automatic savings programs, which can help consumers overcome that hurdle. Only one third of Canadians, however, make “regular contributions” to their savings account.

“Once you’ve tracked your monthly budget, it is important to thoroughly examine your spending habits in order to make informed decisions and to reach your savings goals,” Contreras said.

via Bills, debt keep Canadians from saving: RBC – Moneyville.ca.

The Public Health Agency of Canada has once again given their seal of approval for the injection of a dangerous cocktail of toxic chemicals they call a trivalent vaccine. The 2010/11 recipients of AstraZeneca’s FLUMIST will be exposed to several strains of live viruses including H1N1 and H3N2. The vaccine also contains MSG and other known neurotoxins and immunotoxins.

Similar to last year’s Arepanrix Vaccine, FLUMIST was approved without evaluating its safety and effectiveness on a single Canadian.

The vaccines are especially being promoted for children since the nasal spray vaccine can be marketed as less invasive due its intranasal delivery that does not require needles. Ontario’s chief medical officer of health said a non-injectable vaccine is an “attractive option.” The product has been on the U.S. market for the last seven years.

AstraZeneca Canada is currently ensuring that all Canadian pharmacies are making preparations to stock the vaccine this fall. The influenza vaccine will be one of several vaccines to be offered on the Canadian market.

On August 26, 2010, Health Canada issued a Notice of Decision to AstraZeneca Canada for the FLUMIST vaccine.

The FLUMIST Trivalent vaccine product information:

Three Live Viruses:
- Influenza Virus Type A (H1N1);
- Influenza Virus Type A (H3N2); and
- Influenza Virus Type B

via Canadians To Be Vaccinated With Live H1N1 Virus with MSG For The 2010/11 Flu Season.

Tell Prime Minister Harper and Minister Ritz that you do not support the import of cat and dog fur – or the commercial seal slaughter >>

This sentiment goes against the vast majority of Canadians who decry the annual seal hunt and the government’s effort to protect the seal fur trade.

What’s more, a large number of the estimated 2 million dog and cat skins originate in China, where regulations are virtually nonexistent and animal suffering is beyond extreme.

And because Canada has no labeling requirements for fur garments, it is nearly impossible for consumers to avoid the cruelty-ridden skins.

Take action >>

The United States and the European Union already prohibit the import of dog and cat fur. It’s time for Canada to follow suit!

Thank you for everything you do….