CANADA fra – CANADA VOICE https://canadavoice.info Editor-in-Chief: Nabil Elbkaili Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:33:51 +0000 ar hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 RCI: Deux Américains coupables des meurtres de Daniel Langlois et de Dominique Marchand https://canadavoice.info/rci-deux-americains-coupables-des-meurtres-de-daniel-langlois-et-de-dominique-marchand/ Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:33:51 +0000 https://canadavoice.info/?p=181190 Les corps des deux Québécois ont été retrouvés dans leur véhicule calciné en décembre 2023.

RCI

Les Américains Jonathan Lehrer et Robert Snyder Jr ont été reconnus coupables mardi des meurtres de l’entrepreneur québécois Daniel Langlois et de sa femme, Dominique Marchand, survenus en décembre 2023 sur l’île de la Dominique.

Le jury dans cette affaire a délibéré pendant moins de deux heures avant de rendre son verdict au palais de justice de Roseau, la capitale de la Dominique, au terme d’un procès hautement attendu sur l’île des Caraïbes….

Pour lire l’article complet sur le site officiel, cliquez ici.

]]> RCI: Le renouvellement du passeport en ligne maintenant ouvert à tous les adultes https://canadavoice.info/rci-le-renouvellement-du-passeport-en-ligne-maintenant-ouvert-a-tous-les-adultes/ Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:30:58 +0000 https://canadavoice.info/?p=181188

RCI / Emma Hautecoeur

Le gouvernement du Canada n’impose plus de limites sur le nombre d’adultes admissibles pouvant effectuer un renouvellement de passeport en ligne. Un net avantage pour les Canadiens vivant dans des communautés rurales, ceux à mobilité réduite et « les gens très occupés », a déclaré la ministre de l’Immigration, des Réfugiés et de la Citoyenneté, Lena Diab, à Vancouver. …

Pour lire l’article complet sur le site officiel, cliquez ici.

]]> RCI: Les cours pourraient reprendre au Collège supérieur de Sherbrooke https://canadavoice.info/rci-les-cours-pourraient-reprendre-au-college-superieur-de-sherbrooke/ Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:27:46 +0000 https://canadavoice.info/?p=181185 RCI / Charlotte Dubois

Les élèves pourraient bientôt être de retour sur les bancs du Collège supérieur de Sherbrooke (CSS). Selon l’établissement d’enseignement privé, le Tribunal administratif du Québec a rendu mardi une décision « ordonnant la suspension des décisions de la ministre [de l’Éducation] », peut-on lire dans un communiqué….

Pour lire l’article complet sur le site officiel, cliquez ici.

]]> RCI: La traductrice de L’Odyssée démolit le film de Christopher Nolan https://canadavoice.info/rci-la-traductrice-de-lodyssee-demolit-le-film-de-christopher-nolan/ Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:25:33 +0000 https://canadavoice.info/?p=181182

RCI / Charles Rioux

L’autrice et traductrice britannico-américaine Emily Wilson, dont la traduction en anglais de L’Odyssée d’Homère a inspiré Christopher Nolan pour son adaptation ambitieuse de l’épopée grecque (nouvelle fenêtre), a vivement critiqué le film dans un essai publié lundi, dans lequel elle déplore notamment une « écriture exécrable ».

La traduction d’Emily Wilson, qui est également professeure d’études classiques à l’Université de Pennsylvanie, a fait grand bruit lors de sa parution, en 2017. Il s’agissait de la première traduction intégrale en anglais de l’œuvre réalisée par une femme….

Pour lire l’article complet sur le site officiel, cliquez ici.

]]> RCI: Le Benadryl dans la mire du Centre antipoison du Québec https://canadavoice.info/rci-le-benadryl-dans-la-mire-du-centre-antipoison-du-quebec/ Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:23:41 +0000 https://canadavoice.info/?p=181175  

RCI / Marie-Christine Gagnon

Après les recommandations du Bureau du coroner et du gouvernement provincial, le Centre antipoison du Québec appuie l’avis d’exclure de la vente libre la diphénhydramine, généralement connue sous la marque de médicament Benadryl. L’objectif est de renverser la tendance puisque les intoxications à ce produit sont en hausse au Québec….

Pour lire l’article complet sur le site officiel, cliquez ici.

]]> Halifax man charged after child receives explicit message over social media https://canadavoice.info/halifax-man-charged-after-child-receives-explicit-message-over-social-media/ Sat, 06 Sep 2025 06:41:47 +0000 https://canadavoice.info/?p=166085

CITYnews halifax / By Chris Halef.

Regional police have charged a Halifax man with child luring offences.

On Sept. 1, police responded to a complaint that a child received a sexually explicit message over social media from a man she knew.

Police say the man then invited the child to meet with the intent of engaging in a sexual act.

According to HRP, the child shared the message with a trusted adult and did not meet with the man.

Cameron Copage, 24, was arrested on Thursday in Dartmouth.

He was scheduled to appear in Halifax provincial court to face charges including luring a person under 16 years of age by means of telecommunication and breach of a probation order.

Anyone with information on child pornography is asked to contact HRP or Crime Stoppers.

]]> Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88 https://canadavoice.info/pope-francis-first-latin-american-pontiff-who-ministered-with-a-charming-humble-style-dies-at-88/ Tue, 22 Apr 2025 04:33:19 +0000 https://canadavoice.info/?p=155426

CITYnews halifax / By Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis, history’s first Latin American pontiff who charmed the world with his humble style and concern for the poor but alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and climate change, died Monday. He was 88.

The Vatican said Francis died of a cerebral stroke that put him into a coma and led to irreversible heart failure.

Bells tolled in Catholic churches from his native Argentina to the Philippines and across Rome as news spread around the world.

“At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the home of the Father. His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of his Church,” Cardinal Kevin Farrell said from the chapel of the Domus Santa Marta, where Francis lived.

Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025, for a respiratory crisis that developed into double pneumonia. He spent 38 days there, the longest hospitalization of his 12-year papacy.

He made his last public appearance on Easter Sunday — a day before his death — to bless thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, drawing wild cheers and applause. Beforehand, he met U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

Francis performed the blessing from the same loggia where he was introduced on March 13, 2013, as the 266th pope.

From his first greeting that night — a remarkably normal “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) — to his embrace of refugees and the downtrodden, Francis signaled a very different tone for the papacy, stressing humility over hubris for a Catholic Church beset by scandal and accusations of indifference.

The Argentine-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio brought a breath of fresh air into a 2,000-year-old institution that had seen its influence wane during the troubled tenure of Pope Benedict XVI, whose surprise resignation led to Francis’ election.

But Francis soon invited troubles of his own, and conservatives grew increasingly upset with his progressive bent, outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics and crackdown on traditionalists. His greatest test came in 2018 when he botched a notorious case of clergy sexual abuse in Chile, and the scandal that festered under his predecessors erupted anew.

And then Francis, the crowd-loving, globe-trotting pope of the peripheries, navigated the unprecedented reality of leading a universal religion through the coronavirus pandemic from a locked-down Vatican City.

“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented,” Francis told an empty St. Peter’s Square in March 2020. Calling for a rethink of the global economic framework, he said the pandemic showed the need for “all of us to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.”

World leaders on Monday extolled Francis’ commitment to the marginalized. French President Emmanuel Macron, whose country is largely Catholic, wrote on X: “From Buenos Aires to Rome, Pope Francis wanted the church to bring joy and hope to the poorest. … May this hope forever outlast him.”

Flags flew at half-staff in Italy, and crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square. When the great bells of St. Peter’s Basilica began tolling, tourists stopped in their tracks to record the moment on their phones.

Johann Xavier, who traveled from Australia, hoped to see the pope during his visit. “But then we heard about it when we came in here. It pretty much devastated all of us,’’ he said.

Francis’ death sets off a weekslong process of allowing the faithful to pay their final respects, first for Vatican officials in the Santa Marta chapel and then in St. Peter’s for the general public, followed by a funeral and a conclave to elect a new pope.

As the sun was setting on Monday evening, the Vatican held a Rosary prayer in St. Peter’s Square in its first public commemoration.

Reforming the Vatican

Francis was elected on a mandate to reform the Vatican bureaucracy and finances but went further in shaking up the church without changing its core doctrine. “Who am I to judge?” he replied when asked about a purportedly gay priest.

The comment sent a message of welcome to the LGBTQ+ community and those who felt shunned by a church that had stressed sexual propriety over unconditional love. “Being homosexual is not a crime,” he told The Associated Press in 2023, urging an end to civil laws that criminalize it.

Stressing mercy, Francis changed the church’s position on the death penalty, calling it inadmissible in all circumstances. He also declared the possession of nuclear weapons, not just their use, was “immoral.”

In other firsts, he approved an agreement with China over bishop nominations that had vexed the Vatican for decades, met the Russian patriarch and charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.

He reaffirmed the all-male, celibate priesthood and upheld the church’s opposition to abortion, equating it to “hiring a hit man to solve a problem.”

Roles for women

But he added women to important decision-making roles and allowed them to serve as lectors and acolytes in parishes. He let women vote alongside bishops in periodic Vatican meetings, following long-standing complaints that women do much of the church’s work but are barred from power.

Sister Nathalie Becquart, whom Francis named to one of the highest Vatican jobs, said his legacy was a vision of a church where men and women existed in a relationship of reciprocity and respect.

“It was about shifting a pattern of domination — from human being to the creation, from men to women — to a pattern of cooperation,” said Becquart, the first woman to hold a voting position in a Vatican synod.

Still, a note of criticism came Monday from the Women’s Ordination Conference, which had been frustrated by Francis’ unwillingness to push for the ordination of women.

“His repeated ‘closed door’ policy on women’s ordination was painfully incongruous with his otherwise pastoral nature, and for many, a betrayal of the synodal, listening church he championed. This made him a complicated, frustrating, and sometimes heart-breaking figure for many women,” the statement said.

The church as refuge

While Francis did not allow women to be ordained, the voting reform was part of a revolutionary change in emphasizing what the church should be: a refuge for everyone — “todos, todos, todos” (“everyone, everyone, everyone”). Migrants, the poor, prisoners and outcasts were invited to his table far more than presidents or powerful CEOs.

“For Pope Francis, (the goal) was always to extend the arms of the church to embrace all people, not to exclude anyone,” said Farrell, the Vatican camerlengo, who takes charge after a pontiff’s death.

Francis demanded his bishops apply mercy and charity to their flocks, pressed the world to protect God’s creation from climate disaster, and challenged countries to welcome those fleeing war, poverty and oppression.

After visiting Mexico in 2016, Francis said of then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump that anyone building a wall to keep migrants out “is not Christian.”

While progressives were thrilled with Francis’ radical focus on Jesus’ message of mercy and inclusion, it troubled conservatives who feared he watered down Catholic teaching and threatened the very Christian identity of the West. Some even called him a heretic.

A few cardinals openly challenged him. Francis usually responded with his typical answer to conflict: silence.

He made it easier for married Catholics to get an annulment, allowed priests to absolve women who had had abortions and decreed that priests could bless same-sex couples. He opened debate on issues like homosexuality and divorce, giving pastors wiggle room to discern how to accompany their flocks, rather than handing them strict rules to apply.

St. Francis of Assisi as a model

Francis lived in the Vatican hotel instead of the Apostolic Palace, wore his old orthotic shoes and not the red loafers of the papacy, and rode in compact cars. It wasn’t a gimmick.

“I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he told a Jesuit journal in 2013. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”

If becoming the first Latin American and first Jesuit pope wasn’t enough, Francis was also the first to name himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century friar known for personal simplicity and care for society’s outcasts.

Francis formally apologized to Indigenous peoples for the crimes of the church from colonial times onward. And he went to society’s fringes to minister with mercy: caressing the deformed head of a man in St. Peter’s Square, kissing the tattoo of a Holocaust survivor, or inviting Argentina’s garbage scavengers to join him onstage in Rio de Janeiro.

“We have always been marginalized, but Pope Francis always helped us,” said Coqui Vargas, a transgender woman whose Roman community forged a unique relationship with Francis.

His first trip as pope was to the Italian island of Lampedusa, then the epicenter of Europe’s migration crisis. He consistently chose to visit poor countries where Christians were often persecuted minorities, rather than the centers of global Catholicism.

Friend and fellow Argentine, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, said his concern was based on the Beatitudes — the eight blessings Jesus delivered in the Sermon on the Mount for the meek, the merciful, the poor in spirit and others.

“Why are the Beatitudes the program of this pontificate? Because they were the basis of Jesus Christ’s own program,” Sánchez said.

Missteps on sexual abuse scandal

But more than a year passed before Francis met with survivors of priestly sexual abuse, and victims’ groups initially questioned whether he really understood the scope of the problem.

Francis did create a sex abuse commission to advise the church on best practices, but it lost influence after a few years and its recommendation of a tribunal to judge bishops who covered up for predator priests went nowhere.

And then came the greatest crisis of his papacy, when he discredited Chilean abuse victims in 2018 and stood by a controversial bishop linked to their abuser. Realizing his error, Francis invited the victims to the Vatican for a personal mea culpa and summoned the leadership of the Chilean church to resign en masse.

As that crisis concluded, a new one erupted over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington and a counselor to three popes.

Francis had actually moved swiftly to sideline McCarrick amid an accusation he had molested a teenage altar boy in the 1970s. But Francis nevertheless was accused by the Vatican’s one-time U.S. ambassador of having rehabilitated McCarrick early in his papacy.

Francis eventually defrocked McCarrick after a Vatican investigation determined he sexually abused adults as well as minors. He changed church law to remove the pontifical secret surrounding abuse cases and enacted procedures to investigate bishops who abused or covered for their pedophile priests, seeking to end impunity for the hierarchy.

“He sincerely wanted to do something and he transmitted that,” said Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean abuse survivor Francis discredited who later developed a close friendship with the pontiff.

But groups that advocated for more action on sexual abuse expressed disappointment in Francis’ legacy.

“Pope Francis was a beacon of hope to many of the world’s most desperate and marginalized people. But what we most needed from this pope was justice for the Church’s own wounded, the children and adults sexually abused by Catholic clergy. In this realm, where Francis had supreme power, he refused to make the necessary changes,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the U.S.-based group BishopAccountability.

A change from Benedict

The road to Francis’ 2013 election was paved by Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to resign and retire — the first in 600 years.

Francis didn’t shy from Benedict’s potentially uncomfortable shadow. Francis embraced him as an elder statesman and adviser, coaxing him out of his cloistered retirement to participate in the public life of the church until Benedict’s death in 2022.

“It’s like having your grandfather in the house, a wise grandfather,” Francis said.

Francis’ looser liturgical style and pastoral priorities made clear he and the German-born theologian came from very different religious traditions, and Francis directly overturned several decisions of his predecessor.

He made sure Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, a hero to the liberation theology movement in Latin America, was canonized after his case languished under Benedict over concerns about the credo’s Marxist bent.

Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed, arguing it was divisive. The move riled Francis’ traditionalist critics and opened sustained conflict with right-wing Catholics, particularly in the U.S.

Conservatives oppose Francis

By then, conservatives had already turned away from Francis, betrayed after he opened debate on allowing remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments if they didn’t get an annulment — a church ruling that their first marriage was invalid.

“We don’t like this pope,” headlined Italy’s conservative daily Il Foglio a few months into the papacy, reflecting the unease of the small but vocal traditionalist Catholic movement.

Those same critics amplified their complaints after Francis approved church blessings for same-sex couples, and a controversial accord with China over nominating bishops.

Its details were never released, but conservative critics bashed it as a sellout to communist China, while the Vatican defended it as the best deal it could get.

U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a figurehead in the anti-Francis opposition, said the church had become “like a ship without a rudder.”

Burke waged his opposition campaign for years, starting when Francis fired him as the Vatican’s supreme court justice and culminating with his vocal opposition to Francis’ 2023 synod on the church’s future.

Francis eventually sanctioned Burke financially, accusing him of sowing “disunity.”

Francis insisted his bishops and cardinals imbue themselves with the “odor of their flock” and minister to the faithful, voicing displeasure when they didn’t.

His 2014 Christmas address to the Vatican Curia was one of the greatest public papal reprimands ever: Standing in the marbled Apostolic Palace, Francis ticked off 15 ailments he said can afflict his closest collaborators, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” lusting for power and the “terrorism of gossip.”

Trying to eliminate corruption, Francis oversaw the reform of the scandal-marred Vatican bank and sought to wrestle Vatican bureaucrats into financial line, limiting their compensation and ability to receive gifts or award public contracts.

He authorized Vatican police to raid his own secretariat of state and the Vatican’s financial watchdog agency amid suspicions about a 350 million euro investment in a London real estate venture. After a 2 1/2-year trial, the Vatican tribunal convicted a once-powerful cardinal, Angelo Becciu, of embezzlement and returned mixed verdicts to nine others, acquitting one.

The trial, though, proved to be a reputational boomerang for the Holy See, showing deficiencies in the Vatican’s legal system, unseemly turf battles among monsignors, and how the pope had intervened on behalf of prosecutors.

While earning praise for trying to turn the Vatican’s finances around, Francis angered U.S. conservatives for his frequent excoriation of the global financial market.

Economic justice was an important theme of his papacy, and he didn’t hide it in his first meeting with journalists when he said he wanted a “poor church that is for the poor.”

In his first major teaching document, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis denounced trickle-down economic theories as unproven and naive.

“Money must serve, not rule!” he said in urging political reforms.

Some U.S. conservatives branded Francis a Marxist. He jabbed back by saying he had many friends who were Marxists.

Soccer, opera and prayer

Born Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the eldest of five children of Italian immigrants.

He credited his devout grandmother Rosa with teaching him how to pray. Weekends were spent listening to opera on the radio, going to Mass and attending matches of the family’s beloved San Lorenzo soccer club. As pope, his love of soccer brought him a huge collection of jerseys from visitors.

He said he received his religious calling at 17 while going to confession, recounting in a 2010 biography that, “I don’t know what it was, but it changed my life. … I realized that they were waiting for me.”

He entered the diocesan seminary but switched to the Jesuit order in 1958, attracted to its missionary tradition and militancy.

Around this time, he suffered from pneumonia, which led to the removal of part of his right lung. His frail health prevented him from becoming a missionary, and his less-than-robust lung capacity was perhaps responsible for his whisper of a voice and reluctance to sing at Mass.

On Dec. 13, 1969, he was ordained a priest, and immediately began teaching. In 1973, he was named head of the Jesuits in Argentina, an appointment he later acknowledged was “crazy” given he was only 36. “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he admitted in his Civilta Cattolica interview.

Life under Argentina’s dictatorship

His six-year tenure as the head of the order in Argentina coincided with the country’s murderous 1976-83 dictatorship, when the military launched a campaign against left-wing guerrillas and other regime opponents.

Bergoglio didn’t publicly confront the junta and was accused of effectively allowing two slum priests to be kidnapped and tortured by not publicly endorsing their work.

He refused for decades to counter that version of events. Only in a 2010 authorized biography did he finally recount the lengths he used to save them, persuading the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so he could celebrate Mass instead. Once in the junta leader’s home, Bergoglio privately appealed for mercy. Both priests were eventually released, among the few to have survived prison.

As pope, accounts began to emerge of the many people — priests, seminarians and political dissidents —whom Bergoglio actually saved during the “dirty war,” letting them stay incognito at the seminary or helping them escape the country.

Bergoglio went to Germany in 1986 to research a never-finished thesis. Returning to Argentina, he was stationed in Cordoba during a period he described as a time of “great interior crisis.” Out of favor with more progressive Jesuit leaders, he was eventually rescued from obscurity in 1992 by St. John Paul II, who named him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. He became archbishop six years later, and was made a cardinal in 2001.

He came close to becoming pope in 2005 when Benedict was elected, gaining the second-most votes in several rounds before bowing out.

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This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the camerlengo’s last name. It is Farrell, not Ferrell.

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Associated Press writer Colleen Barry contributed from Milan.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press

]]> Man arrested in B.C. brought back to N.S. to face slew of human trafficking offences https://canadavoice.info/man-arrested-in-b-c-brought-back-to-n-s-to-face-slew-of-human-trafficking-offences/ Wed, 05 Mar 2025 02:59:09 +0000 https://canadavoice.info/?p=151572

CITYnews halifax / By Chris Halef

A man is facing a laundry list of human trafficking offences in connection to an investigation that was launched nearly two years ago.

In July 2023, the Nova Scotia Human Trafficking Unit (HTU) received a report from a victim of human trafficking who was a youth at the time the offences began. Officers later discovered there was a second victim.

According to RCMP, the crimes took place between 2017 and 2023, while the victims and the accused were in Nova Scotia.

More crime stories:

Police said last month, officers from the HTU travelled to British Columbia and arrested 31-year-old Simon McNamee, who was living in Vancouver.

He was taken back to Nova Scotia where he was charged with a total of 17 offences, including receiving material benefit from sexual services, procuring – person under 18, advertising sexual services, and trafficking in persons.

“We are here to support victims of human trafficking, which often includes laying charges and making arrests, however, we will only proceed if victims are comfortable with charges being laid,” says Cpl. Brianna Taker. “We collaborate with many other support organizations in Nova Scotia who provide resources for victims, and the Nova Scotia Human Trafficking Unit can be reached at anytime on our Hotline – 902-449-2425. As always, call 911 if you’re in immediate danger.”

McNamee appeared in Halifax Provincial Court on Feb. 26 and was released by the courts on conditions pending future court appearances.

 

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Regional councillor files motion to stop municipality from using X https://canadavoice.info/regional-councillor-files-motion-to-stop-municipality-from-using-x/ Sat, 08 Feb 2025 23:02:39 +0000 https://canadavoice.info/?p=148512

CITYnews halifax / By Rachel Morgan

A regional councillor has filed a motion asking staff to consider the feasibility of removing X as a social media platform used by Halifax Regional Municipality. Currently the platform is used to distribute information to residents.

Councillor Laura White, who represents District 7, said she filed the motion in growing concern about the platform’s governance going against municipal values of “evidence-based decision making and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility”.

“In the past two-plus years since Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X) the platform has become less congenial, informative and useful, and more toxic,” Councillor White wrote in her reasoning. “X is no longer a medium that many reputable organizations are comfortable associating with.”

The motion will be brought to a vote on Feb. 11. If it passes, it asks regional staff to come back to council with a report that determines the feasibility of abandoning X. The report would provide a timeline for discontinuing use and provide alternative options to distribute information to residents.

]]> It’s sick season. Here’s how to protect yourself from norovirus, COVID-19, flu and RSV https://canadavoice.info/its-sick-season-heres-how-to-protect-yourself-from-norovirus-covid-19-flu-and-rsv/ Sun, 12 Jan 2025 03:25:43 +0000 https://canadavoice.info/?p=144237

CITYnews halifax / By The Associated Press

In the winter months, it seems few are safe from some kind of illness — flu, COVID-19, norovirus, colds.

While many of the germs that cause this misery can circulate throughout the year, scientists think that the winter surge of flu and cold activity may be because we spend more time indoors and the cold, dry air may weaken our defenses.

But knowing what these bugs are and how they spread can help. While it may be difficult to make it through the season totally unscathed, there are some things you can do to protect yourself from these respiratory and stomach viruses.

How do I know whether I have the cold, the flu, COVID-19 or something else?

Some symptoms are hard to distinguish among illnesses, especially with respiratory viruses. Others are unmistakable.

  • Norovirus is a foodborne illness that can spread through water and contaminated surfaces and can cause vomiting, diarrhea, nausea and stomach pain for about one to three days.
  • The common cold can be caused by several different types of viruses and can cause a runny nose, congestion, cough, sneezing, sore throat, headaches, body aches or low fever for less than a week.
  • The flu, caused by influenza viruses that are always changing, leads to fever, chills, cough, sore throat, runny nose, body aches, headaches and feeling tired. Flu symptoms tend to hit more quickly than cold symptoms, and can last anywhere from a few days to two weeks.
  • COVID-19 can cause fever, chills, cough, short of breath, sore throat, congestion, loss of smell or taste, fatigue, aches, headache, nausea, or vomiting for several days.
  • RSV can cause a runny nose, congestion, coughing, sneezing, wheezing, fever and a loss of appetite for a week or two.

One way to protect yourself from all viruses: Wash your hands

Seriously. Rigorous and frequent handwashing — with soap! — is crucial to reduce the spread of norovirus, colds, flu and COVID-19.

This is especially true after using the bathroom and eating or preparing food, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

Don’t speed through it, either. Count to 20, slowly, while you scrub away.

If you don’t have access to soap and water, try a hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol — though that isn’t enough to wipe out norovirus.

Cleaning surfaces can wipe out viruses

If norovirus has found you, you’ll want to immediately clean surfaces that came in contact with contaminated food or bodily fluids. The CDC recommends disinfecting things with a chlorine bleach solution or one of the products listed on this Environmental Protection Agency website.

Don’t forget to wash any clothing that came in contact with vomit or feces — use hot water and detergent. Then, wash your hands. Again.

With colds and flu, it’s best to regularly clean surfaces that you come into a lot of contact with. Think doorknobs, light switches, countertops, beloved toys, cellphones.

Use household cleaning products that contain soap or detergent, and follow it up with a sanitizer. The CDC has more tips on how to clean.

COVID-19 generally spreads through the air from droplets and particles, and the CDC says the risk of getting the virus from a contaminated surface is low.

Keeping your hands off your face can keep viruses out

Viruses can spread through talking, coughing and sneezing, so cover your mouth with a tissue if you feel a tickle in your throat or your nose. Then, wash your hands. Again.

Also, even if you’re not sick, consider masking in crowded areas with an N95 or medical-grade mask to protect yourself from respiratory viruses.

Don’t touch your face: If you have a germ or virus on your unwashed hands — respiratory or norovirus — and touch your face, eyes or nose, it can get into your mucus membranes and, voila!, you’re sick!

Consider a vaccine (if there is one)

Updated COVID-19 vaccines are available, as well as annual flu shots for people 6 months and older. For those 60 and older or for people who are pregnant, you may want to get the RSV vaccine.

But there is no vaccine for norovirus or the common cold.

Another way to keep your defenses against viruses up: Rest

Your immune system may not work as well if you’re sleep-deprived, stressed out or dehydrated. So don’t grind yourself into the ground if you can help it. Rest. Sleep. Drink water.

If you are sick, stay at home

If you do get sick, prompt testing can help determine whether you have COVID-19 or influenza. That’s important to see if you need one of the medicines that can help prevent severe illness: Paxlovid for COVID-19 and Tamiflu for flu.

Above all, if you’re symptomatic, stay at home to keep from getting others sick.

To treat a cold, flu or COVID-19, rest and drink fluids. You can take pain relievers to lower a fever or help with an achy body. Humidifiers can help with symptoms, too.

There’s no medication for norovirus. Instead, you’ll need to rehydrate as much as possible with water and other liquids. Seek help if you are dehydrated and notice you have a dry mouth and throat, aren’t urinating as much or feel dizzy when you’re standing up.

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