Yesterday Canadian economics blogger Mike Moffatt posted his thoughts about the costs of reducing the murder rate by 30 percent through water treatment. The post was based on a Big Think article that studied correlations between higher lithium amounts in public drinking water and drops in suicides and violent crime rates. Lithium, a mood-booster, is […] More »
If you’ve picked up the latest issue of This Magazine, you might have noticed Jenn Hardy’s article on Canada’s midwife shortage. (Jenn is a former This intern and now a Montreal-based freelance writer. She has written for us recently on sustainable agriculture, Montreal musician Vanessa Rodrigues, and investigated the environmental claims of the DivaCup.) You […] More »
If you live in a major Canadian city, you may have seen Plan Canada’s “Because I am a Girl” ads plastered on buses and billboards. In the season of giving, the campaign attempts to sell the virtues of female empowerment. Ads state that girls around the world are three times more likely to be malnourished […] More »
Canadians – a bunch of walking, talking BPA vessels? Apparently so. Statistics Canada recently released results from their first nationwide look into bisphenol A, and the results aren’t pretty. According to a Globe and Mail report on the stats, 91 per cent of Canadians tested show some sort of BPA exposure, and teenagers carry most of […] More »
Although Pride Toronto decided to reschedule its week-long festivities in light of the G20 circus coming to town, the committee for the AIDS Candlelight Vigil, an event associated with Pride Week, decided it would take advantage of the politically charged atmosphere. We took the opportunity to speak with Kay Roesslein, co-chair of the AIDS Candlelight […] More »
We’ve talked a lot about what’s going wrong so far with the G20 and G8 meetings taking place in Ontario this year. And lord knows there are plenty of problems: aside from the lack of discussion surrounding women’s health we’re now chopping down trees in an urban jungle and searching around for supposedly stolen police […] More »
[Editor’s note: Alixandra Gould is attending the 2010 Canadian Water Summit on Thursday, June 17. In advance of that, she interviewed a few of the experts who will be speaking at the event about some of the key issues in current Canadian water policy. Today we bring you her report on the sorry state of […] More »
Aside from the fact that single older women have enough stigma to deal with, the “cougar” trend has been a rampant part of pop culture for years now. And while, for some reason, the thought of an older woman dating a younger man draws giggles and raised eyebrows more often than not, up until this […] More »
The more things change, the more they stay the same. This certainly rings true in the world of health policy: there’s a lot of talk, and the idea of change or reform is nice to think about, regardless of whether it ever happens. Recently, it seems that absolutely nothing is changing at all. Because for […] More »
Chances are Henrietta Lacks has been a part of your life. Without actually seeing her, Lacks could have helped you recover from surgery or a rare medical treatment. And while you might not know who she is, you may have heard of her alter ego: HeLa. Henrietta Lacks lived only to the age of 31, […] More »
Pretty much every “women and children first!” joke has already been made relating to the upcoming G8/G20 conferences in Toronto and Muskoka, and the Prime Minister’s announcement that maternal and children’s health would be the core of the agenda. The Conservatives have been dancing around the issue of reproductive planning and what they actually consider […] More »