As fungal infections grow resistant to medication, desperate patients try drug after drug

Aria Bendix - NBC NEWS

LONG READ

After living with a severe fungal allergy for about 40 years, Jill Fairweather is running out of treatment options.

Now 65, Fairweather was diagnosed with aspergillosis, a disease caused by the common mold Aspergillus, in her 20s. The illness can result from an allergic reaction or an infection in the lungs. Over the years, Fairweather has tried medication after medication, switching once side effects get too dangerous or the fungus develops resistance.

Aspergillus and another fungus, Candida auris, are growing resistant to the treatments frequently used to fight them — in particular, a class of drugs called azoles.

"If we lose that drug class because of resistance, we’re in for big trouble," said Darius Armstrong-James, an infectious disease physician at Royal Brompton Hospital in the U.K.

Fairweather has a rattle in her chest that she said feels as if she’s trying to expel a piece of rubber. Sometimes she coughs up blood.

After she developed resistance to an inhaled antifungal medication often considered a last resort, Fairweather started on an intravenous drug cocktail that recently required a two-week stay in the hospital on an IV drip.

"If the intravenous treatment stops working, I’ve run out of options," she said.

Globally, around 4.8 million people have lung disease from allergy-based aspergillosis like Fairweather's, according to a 2013 estimate. The survival rate of chronic lung disease from aspergillosis was 62% at five years and 47% at 10 years, a 2017 study found.


Jill Fairweather’s daily dose of medications. 

Doctors anticipate more cases like Fairweather's as fungal infections become more prevalent in Europe and the U.S.

Candida auris infections rose more than eightfold in the U.S. between 2017 and 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — from 171 annual cases to 1,420. In the U.S., the mortality rate of an invasive Candida auris infection ranges from 30% to 60%.

That fungus usually affects people in health care settings. In May, Nevada's state health department recorded Candida auris outbreaks at 19 hospitals and nursing facilities.

The CDC does not track aspergillosis in the same way, so it's hard to know how prevalent cases are. But hospitalizations related to invasive aspergillosis — severe infections in people with weakened immune systems — rose 3% annually from 2000 to 2013, according to one study. A CDC report published Wednesday showed that the U.S. recorded more than 14,000 hospitalizations for invasive aspergillosis each year.

The report highlighted the case of a 65-year-old man who underwent a stem cell transplant. Afterward, doctors prescribed him azoles to ward off a fungal infection, but they detected Aspergillus in his lungs more than three weeks into his hospital stay. A second type of azole also failed to stop his infection, and he died less than a week later.

The report determined that the patient had been infected with an Aspergillus species that’s resistant to azoles — one of the same strains Fairweather has.

Patients with invasive aspergillosis from this drug-resistant strain have a mortality rate of around 60%, according to the CDC.
How fungi invade the body

Most healthy people inhale Aspergillus frequently with no consequences. The spores lingers in damp homes, soil, seeds and decaying vegetation.

"You live on Earth and breathe, you’re going to get Aspergillus in your lungs," said Dr. Peter Pappas, a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

But in people with weakened immune systems or chronic lung conditions, the fungus is a threat.

Fairweather, who lives in Berkshire, England, had severe asthma as a child, which likely made her more susceptible to aspergillosis. Still, she took corticosteroids and lived fairly normally until her 40s, when she started to get ill frequently.

If she caught a cold, Fairweather said, “I would end up being off work for two weeks and have a chest infection or end up with pneumonia.”

Jill Fairweather at work in her office on Aug. 11. 

Franklin Dobbs, a 76-year-old patient of Pappas’, also had pre-existing lung problems before he was diagnosed with aspergillosis last year. Dobbs said he hemorrhaged on and off for about a year before getting diagnosed. His case has thus far not proved drug-resistant.

An azole called Noxafil improved his symptoms, Dobbs said, though he still feels weak.

“I’m still having a problem with the strength in my legs,” he said.

Dobbs believes he might have been exposed while planting tomatoes, corn and peas in the garden, or while building birdhouses outdoors.

An April study found that people can get infected with drug-resistant Aspergillus from their home gardens. The researchers collected lung samples from infected patients in the U.K. and Ireland, and matched some of them to drug-resistant strains in the environments nearby.

Sometimes, a single high-dose exposure, such as a cloud of spores released by digging in soil, can be enough to trigger a fungal infection. But in many cases, people are gradually exposed to Aspergillus over months before they become ill.

“This is an extremely concerning superbug-type situation,” Armstrong-James said. “We’re all inhaling this all the time. So potentially, we could all be inhaling resistant Aspergillus on a daily basis.”

Unlike Aspergillus, Candida auris is mostly detected in hospitals, among people who are on breathing or feeding tubes or receiving a central line (an IV catheter that administers fluids, blood or medication).

"When you have one of those medical interventions that are in patients, you become at risk of it getting into your bloodstream or creating an abscess, and that’s when it’s very dangerous," said Luis Ostrosky, chief of infectious diseases at UTHealth Houston and Memorial Hermann Hospital.

More than 90% of Candida auris strains are resistant to the common azole fluconazole, and up to 73% are resistant to another called voriconazole. Some strains also have resistance to the drug Fairweather recently stopped taking.

"You can end up with a patient with a Candida auris infection where you actually don’t have an antifungal to use for that patient. It’s resistant to everything," Ostrosky said. "Basically those patients go to hospice and die, and there’s nothing you can do."
Why mold is growing resistant to drugs

Researchers have pinpointed two main drivers of antifungal resistance: human drugs and chemicals used in agriculture.

Farmers often rely on fungicides, but over time, certain strains of mold become resistant. And since fungicides are chemically similar to antifungal drugs, some mold strains develop resistance to the medications too.

The 65-year-old man who died of invasive aspergillosis, for instance, was infected with a strain linked to agricultural fungicide use, according to the CDC.

"Bulbs and onions that have been dipped in these antifungals so they don’t spoil are almost like time bombs. When they’re planted, the fungicides that are on their surface will leak out into the environment," said Armstrong-James, who co-authored the April study on Aspergillus.

"That could be a key breeding ground for resistance," he added.


X-ray image showing pulmonary aspergillosis. 

(BSIP / UIG via Getty Images)

Drug use contributes to resistance when antifungal drugs are prescribed too often, or if doctors don't prescribe a high enough dosage or long enough treatment course. That can then put selective pressure on fungi.

“The more you use antifungals or antibacterials, the more resistance that you see,” Pappas said.

Armstrong-James said that hospitals see resistance to Candida auris more frequently than to Aspergillus.

"Every time anyone takes fluconazole, you can get Candida resistance," he said.
Climate change and Covid may each play a role

Climate change may be catalyzing the spread of both Aspergillus and Candida auris.

That's because rising temperatures can lead to more fungicide resistance. Some research suggests that climate change was a key driver of Candida auris’ first appearance in people in 2009.

"Within a very short period of time, you’ve got the emergence of four or five different families of Candida auris more or less co-emerging simultaneously. How does that happen? It really screams if there’s something going on in the environment," Pappas said. "There’s decent evidence that climate change is at least one of the triggers."

Some experts worry that as climate change's effects intensify, even some healthy people could get fungal infections.

"Whilst there’s no evidence for the moment that a perfectly well person could get a severe Aspergillus infection, there’s nothing to say that, with the changing environments, that might not change in the future," Armstrong-James said.

On top of all this came the Covid pandemic, which created new opportunities for Candida auris to spread. A July CDC report found that these infections rose 60% in health care settings from 2019 to 2020.

"Invasive Candida infections just skyrocketed with Covid, presumably because all these patients were sick," Pappas said. "They were given broad spectrum antibiotics. They had lines and ventilators and all the things that you need to generate invasive Candida."

The CDC report found that staffing shortages and lengthy patient stays, among other factors, made it difficult for some hospitals to prevent drug-resistant infections.

"We were having all these traveling nurses that came from different parts of the country that weren’t necessarily attuned to the protocols that the hospital normally has to prevent bloodstream infections," Ostrosky said.


“If the intravenous treatment stops working, 

I’ve run out of options,” Fairweather said. 

New treatment options could take years

Doctors say they're in a race against time, since current treatments could stop working before new ones become available.

“If we don’t manage resistance right now and if we don’t boost the pipeline for the antifungals, we may very easily end up in a place in five to 10 years where you’re having end-of-life discussions with a patient that has an invasive Candida infection," Ostrosky said. "It's just unthinkable right now that your loved one can go into the hospital and have an appendectomy, and they get a complication, and they end up with a bug that’s untreatable."

Several drugs have entered late-stage studies that could produce results in the next year or two, experts said.

But Fairweather isn’t sure she’ll get a chance to try them.

"How much damage will be done to my lungs before these things come into effect?" she said.

Plus, fungi could develop resistance to new medications over time.

"Once they’re out there, they get overused and then pretty quickly, they’re no longer useful," Pappas said.

PHOTOS © Andrew Testa for NBC News

HINT; WARMING OCEANS

Orcas sink a sailboat and ram another on the same morning. Scientists look for answers, reports say
jzitser@businessinsider.com (Joshua Zitser) - 

© Getty ImagesStock photo of a pod of orcas swimming near a boat. 

A group of orcas attacked a small sailboat off Portugal's coast, causing it to sink, per reports.
Shortly after, orcas rammed into another small vessel nearby.

Scientists are investigating why so many killer whale attacks are happening in the area.

A pod of orcas attacked a sailboat off the coast of Portugal on July 31 and, just hours later, targeted another vessel in the same area, according to reports.

The first incident, which local media described as "very much worse than usual," saw orcas ram a small sailboat carrying five people approximately seven miles off the coast of Sines, Portugal.

Orca attacks have sometimes immobilized sailboats, but local media said that, in this instance, it caused so much damage that the vessel started to sink.

The five crew members, who were on vacation, per The Sun, made it onto life rafts and radioed for help. A nearby fishing vessel was able to rescue them, according to a statement by the Portuguese Navy.

Unusually, another orca attack took place nearby just a few hours later.

Newsweek reported that the second orca attack involved a small sailboat with two passengers aboard.

The passengers, who were sleeping at the time of the attack, were traveling from Lisbon to the Algarve, per the local media outlet Portugal Resident.

The orcas, which can grow up to 26 feet long, struck the boat and bit the rudder, immobilizing it, the Portugal Resident said. It was towed to the dry dock.

According to the Portugal Resident, more than 200 attacks by orcas against vessels have been recorded along Portugal and Spain's Iberian Peninsula since 2020.


Orca (Southern Resident Killer Whales) in the Pacific Northwest. 

Monika Wieland Shields/Shutterstock

Scientists are looking into the growing number of orca attacks, the media outlet said, to determine if the killer whales are acting out of curiosity, mischief, or revenge.

Insider previously reported in 2020 about a series of aggressive actions by orcas along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts. At the time, experts told The Observer that the killer whales might have been mounting deliberate attacks, perhaps indicating high levels of stress.

#CRYPTOZOOLOGY #CRYPTID #NESSIE

Scientists make discovery on dinosaur believed to be related to the Loch Ness Monster

Tori B. Powell - 


The plesiosaur — an aquatic dinosaur once thought to exclusively reside in saltwater — is now believed to have spent much of its time in freshwater, according to a new study. The discovery is likely to fuel believers of the Loch Ness Monster on their pursuit of proving the legend is real, as some claim "Nessie" was a descendant of the plesiosaur.



Discovery fuels Loch Ness Monster believers
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Duration 3:34

"As a scientist, I can never say anything is impossible," paleontologist and lead author of the study, Nick Longrich, told CBS News correspondent Dana Jacobson. "All hypotheses are on the table at some level until they're proven false."

He said a team of paleontologists from the University of Bath, the University of Portsmouth in the UK and the Université Hassan II in Morocco discovered "a lot of different plesiosaur fossils" within a 100-million year old river system that's now a part of Morocco's Sahara Desert. The findings, he said, were "a little surprising."

"It indicates this group was able to come specialized to exploit freshwater environments," Longrich said.

The fossils found included bones and teeth from both adults and one baby plesiosaur scattered along different localities, which indicate where the animal died as well as where the animals lived, scientists said.

"We found a lot of fossils suggesting these things were up there routinely and probably spent much, if not all, of their lives in freshwater," Longrich said.

Some believers of the centuries-old Loch Ness Monster folktale say the creature was last seen alive in the Loch Ness freshwater body of water in the Scottish Highlands. But some scientists doubt that an ancient dinosaur could have survived in the loch's dark and frigid water, as it was formed only 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age.

The recent fossil discovery also suggests that the last plesiosaurs went extinct around the same time as the rest of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, which contradicts claims from some Loch Ness Monster believers who say the creature was last seen alive as recent as 1975.

"We could find the Loch Ness Monster tomorrow. It could be a plesiosaur," Longrich said. "I think that is, however, extremely unlikely given the evidence we have at this point."

Nonetheless, the study's paleontologists said the possibility of the so-called Loch Ness Monster being related to a plesiosaur is "plausible."

500-year-old 'goatelope' mummy found in melting European glacier

Denise Hruby - Yesterday - National Geographic

Her feet steady on the glacier, Andrea Fischer pulls the blade of her chainsaw in a circle through the ice, shards flying toward her face. Inside the circle: a mummified chamois, an endearing goat-antelope mix perfectly adapted to the Alps. This one was just a kid—a young female no more than two feet tall.


© Provided by National Geographic

The mummified chamois, a young female, lies exposed on the Gepatschferner, Austria's second largest glacier, near the Italian border and the summit of the Weißseespitze. The chamois is estimated to be about 500 years old.


© Provided by National Geographic

Glaciologist and team leader Andrea Fischer places the chamois on a plastic tarp for transportation.

“We believe that she is about 500 years old,” says Fischer, an Alpine glaciologist from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck.

The skin has slid off the animal’s head, pulling one horn with it and laying bare her deep eye sockets, but it’s still stretched taut and leathery over vertebrae and her ribcage. Tufts of walnut-colored fur, rippling in the wind, cover her hooved legs—powerful, agile limbs that in life would have launched her from rock to rock. In her last moments, she drew them close. She was probably around two years old.

“It’s incredible, and it’s incredible that she’s sitting exactly where we do our research, and that we passed right when it was coming out of the ice,” says Fischer, who has been studying Austria’s dwindling glaciers for more than two decades. A colleague named Martin Stocker-Waldhuber was checking on a weather station when he saw the chamois’ horns peeking out of melting ice, more than 11,000 feet up on Gepatschferner, a large glacier on the Italian border.


© NGM Staff 

Glaciers all over the Alps are melting at an unprecedented rate this summer. Last winter’s scant snows melted early, leaving the ice unprotected against the heat waves that have lately swept across the continent. By the end of the season, Fischer says, as much as seven meters of ice, or 23 feet, will have melted off the surface of glaciers in the eastern Alps—far more than in any previous year.

Sad as this dramatic loss is, there’s also a thrilling sense of anticipation: What other well-preserved relics of the past might emerge from the ice?


© Provided by National Geographic

The researchers prepare to load the chamois onto the helicopter for the flight down the mountain and then the drive back to Innsbruck.

In recent years, long-lost hikers have been found in the Alps, as well as frozen soldiers from the high-altitude battle that Italy and Austria waged against each other during World War I. About 150,000 men died, and many were buried by avalanches or froze to death in snowstorms. Some have been found partially mummified in the ice.


© Provided by National Geographic

Martin Stocker-Waldhuber collects data and adjusts the automatic weather station. It was on a visit to the station in 2021 that he chanced to see the chamois horns peeking out of the ice.

“With the melting of the glaciers, there should be more of these finds, maybe also other humans showing up in the ice,” says Albert Zink, head of the institute for mummy studies at Eurac Research, in Bolzano, Italy. “Actually, it’s quite likely.”

What everyone’s hoping for, he says, is another prehistoric human like the one he has been studying for more than a decade: Ötzi the Iceman, discovered by pure chance in 1991. Ötzi is five thousand years old, ten times older than Fischer’s chamois—but thousands of years’ worth of ice are melting in the Alps this summer.

The chamois may just be the beginning.
A chopper to the chamois


© Provided by National Geographic

Taxidermist Peter Morass from the Ferdinandeum, the Tyrolean state museum in Innsbruck, measures a horn of the chamois.

Early on August 4, photographer Ciril Jazbec and I joined Fischer and her team for the helicopter flight to the top of Gepatschferner, where the clouds sit at eye level.

Stocker-Waldhuber actually first saw the horns sticking out of the ice last summer, but too little of the animal was emerging for it to be extracted safely before winter snow buried it again. After much more melt this summer, the researchers seized a narrow window of opportunity to retrieve the chamois.

“We’ve got two days, perhaps three,” Fischer had said when she first told me about the find.

At 11,500 feet, the weather can change in an instant, rendering helicopter flights too dangerous. And once fully exposed to the air by the melting ice, the mummy will quickly decompose—if bearded vultures circling in the sky above the glacier don’t devour it first.


© Provided by National Geographic

Taxidermist Peter Morass in his lab at the Tyrol museum's research center.

That leaves Fischer no time to work as painstakingly as an archaeologist. After she frees the frozen chamois with her chainsaw and ice axe, she lifts it off the ice and onto a plastic sheet. She notes the foul stench—then quickly wraps the mummy and seals it off with tape.


© Provided by National Geographic

The chamois is being kept in a freezer at the Ferdinandeum research center. It will eventually be exhibited at the museum.

A native of the Alps, Fischer first crossed glaciers as a teenager. Much of that ice is long gone, she says.

The 4,000 glaciers in the Alps have been retreating, by and large, since around 1850, but human-made climate change has rapidly accelerated their demise. By 2100, most will have lost the vast bulk of their ice, leaving just tiny patches that may or may not be called glaciers, according to a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2019.


© Provided by National Geographic

Andrea Fischer collects bits of fur from the site where she extracted the chamois. She also found some old pieces of wood and leather.

Glaciologists like Fischer know all this. And still, she says, “I think none of us could have ever imagined how dramatic this summer could be.”

On Gepatschferner, the dripping and cracking noises grow louder as the sun rises higher—as if the glacier is sounding its own requiem. By noon, long before we board the helicopter for the flight down the mountain, we are stumbling through ankle-deep puddles.

About eight meters of ice remain under the chamois, Fischer says, dating back 6,000 years. She estimates this spot will lose about 4,000 years of ice this year.
Finds like this are rare

Earlier in the summer, I had joined Fischer on a trip to another one of her research sites, the Jamtal glacier along the Austrian-Swiss border. As we hiked up the narrow valley, she pointed out a crumbling, overgrown stone encirclement, built by prehistoric humans to protect cows, sheep, and goats from bears and wolves. Such traces of long-gone settlements are scattered across the Alps.

Around 6,000 years ago, much of the eastern Alps were ice-free. Because the valleys were densely forested swamps, the mountain slopes were where people lived. But by 5,000 years ago, when Ötzi was pierced by an arrow and bled to death on Similaun glacier, just a few miles southeast of Gepatschferner, the ice had begun to grow again.

Upon his discovery 31 years ago, Ötzi was first believed to be a 20th-century hiker or skier who had died in an accident. A local police officer hacked into his hip as he tried to get him out of the ice. For easier transport down the mountains, his bow was broken in half. Then the village undertaker broke his arm to make him fit in a coffin.

Just how much the recovery of this archaeological treasure was botched seems ludicrous now, but scientists were dumbstruck when they realized Ötzi was an ancient, completely intact mummy. Nothing like it had ever been found in a glacier. That’s for good reason, says Norwegian glacial archaeologist Lars Holger Pilø.

Though countless humans and animals have no doubt died on glaciers, Pilø explains, we shouldn’t expect to find many of them, because the ice in a glacier is in constant motion, slowly flowing down into the valley and being replenished by fresh snow at the top. Over centuries, the ice would carry dead animals and humans with it.

“Their bodies would have been damaged and crushed by the moving ice,” Pilø says.

Since Ötzi, though, scientists have realized that there are exceptions to this rule: motionless patches adjacent to or even amid the moving sea of ice. They’re places where the bedrock is flat and the ice cold enough to freeze to it, and not so thick that it begins to flow under its own weight.

Pilø has identified more than 60 motionless ice patches in his Norwegian county of Innlandet alone. Discovering a human mummy in one of them, he says, is his “holy grail.”

Another Ötzi this year?

Fischer’s chamois is now safely stored in a minus 20ºC freezer outside Innsbruck, in the research center of Ferdinandeum, the Tyrolean state museum. The animal is waiting to go through a CT scan, and to have the insides of its gut examined. By studying it along with a 400-year-old chamois mummy that Zink’s team retrieved in 2020, scientists hope to learn more about the little-known history of this species, and perhaps why the two animals ventured out onto glaciers and perished there.

“So far, the best thing I worked on was a panda from the zoo,” Peter Morass, head taxidermist at Ferdinandeum, told me. “But this chamois trumps everything.” In the future, the chamois will be put on a special display at the Innsbruck museum.

For Zink, the two chamois are a chance to learn more about the same processes of mummification that produced Ötzi—and about how best to retrieve and preserve ice mummies across the globe. His institute has already developed conservation boxes that can keep organic specimens sealed and stable at minimal costs.

“So that, when more come out, we are prepared,” Zink says.

Finding mummies was never part of Fischer’s plan. As a glaciologist, she was interested in the motionless spots in glaciers for a different reason: They’re places where she can drill into old ice and extract a record of how climate has warmed and cooled in the Alps over the millennia.

But now that climate is warming rapidly, she realizes that her work as a glaciologist has perfectly positioned her to find the next Ötzi.

Later this summer, when the glaciers reach their peak melt, she plans to fly over the still spots she knows; she has found about 10 in the Austrian Alps. She’ll be scanning the ice for signs that another iceman—or woman—is emerging into the light.

“If it happens,” she says, “then it’s this summer.

Serena Williams' blunt retirement essay is a warning sign to all women: You'll never have it all

insider@insider.com (Marguerite Ward) - 17h ago

Serena Williams' retirement made many women think: If she can't continue a successful career and raise a family, can any child-bearing person? Robert Prange/Getty Images

Serena Williams announced her plans to retire in a raw and candid Vogue essay.

Williams said that as a woman, she's forced to choose between her career and growing a family.

The US economy relies on women's unpaid labor, and there's no change in sight.

"Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family."

In a candid Vogue essay, the tennis superstar Serena Williams said it was time to "evolve" away from tennis and focus on growing her family. It's a decision women have been making for decades — and it won't get better anytime soon.

"If I were a guy, I wouldn't be writing this because I'd be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family," she wrote. "Maybe I'd be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity."

Her words hit me hard; a sense of despair settled over me. Of course, I support Williams' decision to invest in her family, but this isn't the way I wanted her professional career to end.

I hate that I have to be at this crossroads.

I hate that I have to be at this crossroads.

As a kid, my sister and I used to play tennis, pretending we were the Williams sisters. They were the antithesis of dainty dolls; they were symbols of power. Growing up following Serena's career was magical. There didn't seem like there was anything she couldn't do. But reality says otherwise.

If a woman of Williams' means, talent, and resources has to pick between career and family, what does that mean for the rest of the child-bearing population?

"I hate that I have to be at this crossroads," she wrote. I hate it, too.

Things aren't getting better for women


Serena Williams and Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr.

 MICHAEL BRADLEY/AFP via Getty Images

I've always been optimistic, holding on to hope that things could change for women. I've followed Sheryl Sandberg's advice to "lean in." But I wonder, am I being naive? President Joe Biden ran on a big promise to establish paid family leave and more affordable childcare. Even Ivanka Trump threw her support behind it during her father's time in office.

Subsequent efforts made an impact but didn't last. An expanded child tax credit that sent monthly payments to families was a godsend for many parents, but the program ended at the end of last year. After that, the childhood-poverty rate jumped 41%, one study found. It was a sign that many families were again struggling, putting women back in the age-old conundrum of choosing between what makes the most sense for their children: paid or unpaid work.

And the recent Inflation Reduction Act — the pared-down version of Biden's agenda that just passed in the Senate — puts $740 billion behind climate and healthcare spending, but there's nothing about paid leave or affordable childcare. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has said it "goes nowhere near far enough in addressing the problems facing struggling working families." It feels like many Congress members just don't care.

The pandemic has exacerbated the situation for women, whose domestic labor as parents is not compensated — or societally protected with any guaranteed federal paid leave.

"Domestic labor is labor," Laura Danger, a special-education teacher who dropped out of the workforce because of unpredictable childcare, previously told Insider. "It's like we're pretending that this work doesn't matter."

While the circumstances will likely be different from Williams', many women will run up against a similar conundrum at some point: Do they pursue more high-profile work opportunities or scale back to care for children or aging parents? Do we reach for our own version of the 24th Grand Slam, the accolade Williams desperately wanted? Or do we listen to calls from society, our partners, and even our children to care for our family?

Williams is admitting that, for now, women can't have it all. Evidence supports this. Women are more likely to leave the workforce to care for family responsibilities than men, surveys have indicated. Hundreds of thousands of women have exited the workforce amid the pandemic, many citing a lack of affordable childcare. Many have not returned.

There seems to be little reprieve for women who try to make it work, like we're running up against a wall. Hybrid work is not an option for many, and when it is, it comes with its own challenges, like less face-to-face time with key decision-makers who promote people. Another option, part-time work, is also difficult to come by.

Williams summed up the situation, saying she could pursue her career, "but I'm turning 41 this month, and something's got to give."
America is supposed to be highly modernized. But the continued reliance on women's unpaid labor is anything but.


The US is the only highly modernized country without guaranteed parental leave. 

AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth

"These days, if I have to choose between building my tennis résumé and building my family, I choose the latter," Williams added.

The US economy depends on women making that choice. It's more than frustrating: It's not fair.

"If you want to make the economic, rational decision, it makes sense that the person with the larger earnings goes back to work, so that would, most often, be the husband," Matthias Doepke, a Northwestern University economist, previously told Insider.

Attempts to make paid leave law have failed, including over the past year. Each time, many women, like myself, hope that maybe this time will be different. But nothing changes.

Even for a woman of Williams' enormous wealth — she could easily afford the best childcare — someone has to be involved in the child's life. And there's an expectation in society that the woman fill that role.

As Williams puts it, she needs to be either "two feet in" tennis or "two feet out." And she's making the decision to step out. For many women, it's a decision that's all too familiar.

Insider's Juliana Kaplan contributed to this article.

SASKATCHEWAN

Federal Government gives local First Nation $4.1 million in compensation for withheld salaries


Beardy’s and Okemasis Cree Nation has reached a historical settlement with the Government of Canada for compensation over 66 years of withheld salaries from the community’s leadership by the Crown after they were associated with the Northwest Rebellion.

Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Marc Miller announced Monday that the Canadian Government would be giving Beardy’s and Okemasis $4.1 million to reflect the financial value of the funds withheld from 1885 to 1951. ‘

“Canada, I guess they said Beardy’s was part of the Rebellion, so we were stripped of our Chief and our Council members for so many years,” said Beardy’s and Okemasis Chief Edwin Ananas.

Miller said an important part of the reconciliation process was listening to what Indigenous people have been telling the federal government “for ages.” That was a big part of Monday’s announcement.

“This punishment against communities that were a part of the Northwest Resistance, a part of our history and a part of the basis for Canada… It’s a sad element of our history and it’s something that we need to recognize and compensate for,” Miller said.

Anasas said First Nations members will determine where the settlement money goes, but all 3,600 on and off-reserve members of Beardy’s and Okemasis will benefit in some way. Their main focus is on the community’s infrastructure and adequate housing for band membership.

“It’s about financial compensation, but also about respect and dignity,” said Miller. “That’s something that was denied from the community for well over 66 years and even after that… I think this is something we can all agree is a pretty black-and-white violation of treaty.”

According to Ananas, Beardy’s and Okemasis are still fighting to resolve other issues with the Government of Canada, including a Cows and Plows claim that he says will play a huge factor in the community’s future.

The salaries claim was settled in June, but was announced on the morning of August 8 during the opening of the second annual St. Michael’s Indian Residential School Gathering. Survivors will come together for a week-long opportunity to share stories and engage in ceremony on the former grounds of the St. Michael’s Indian Residential School in Duck Lake.

Bailey Sutherland, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Prince Albert Daily Herald

SASKATCHEWAN

Local elders who travelled to Edmonton have mixed reaction to papal apology

A residential school survivor says the Pope’s apology was “not enough” for some elders who travelled to Edmonton from Beardy’s and Okemasis First Nation.

Gaylene Sutherland, Indian Residential School Support Worker at Willow Cree Health Services in Beardy’s and Okemasis and residential school survivor, said she brought forty elders from the first nation to hear the pope’s apology in person on July 25.

Out of the forty elders, only around half were receptive to the pope’s visit.

“Some had mixed emotions, some were angry, some just didn't care too much about it,” Sutherland said. “They are still working on that part of themselves.”

While meeting with Indigenous leaders in Edmonton, Alberta, Pope Francis spoke of his “sorrow, indignation, and shame” over the Catholic Church’s role in the abuse of First Nation’s children in Canada’s residential schools.

Edmonton was the first stop of the Pope’s “penitential pilgrimage”, where he apologized and promised that a “serious investigation” would be conducted into what occurred at the schools.

Sutherland said while many other abuses were mentioned, the unacknowledgement about the sexual abuse that went on in residential schools made many survivors feel unheard.


“It was like it was pushed to the side, [sexual abuse] was a big part of all trauma and the intergerational traumas that have been passed down.”

She said she noticed a lot of elders become disengaged while being faced with the trauma that the visit brought forward.

Sutherland said the apology felt insincere and that more could be done in terms of reconciliation.

“For myself, I’m having mixed feelings. A lot of us felt like it wasn’t from the heart,” she said. “The apology wasn’t coming from him, it didn’t feel genuine. He didn’t acknowledge that the churches were wrong, he was just reading what someone else wrote for him.”

Pope Francis touched down in Edmonton on July 24 where he met with Indigenous leaders, and residential school survivors. He also toured the site of former Ermineskin Residential School, which operated until 1975. He also spoke at Sacred Heart Church in Edmonton, and held Mass in Commonwealth Stadium.

His trip was the fourth papal visit to Canada. The Pope also made stops in Quebec and Nunavut before departing.

Bailey Sutherland, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Prince Albert Daily Herald

Canadian artists may soon receive royalties when their work is resold

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is pictured in 2017. 

Photo courtesy of Thomas Ledl/Wikimedia

Aug. 13 (UPI) -- Canadian politicians are drafting legislation that would amend the country's copyright law to grant artists royalties when their work is resold.

Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez are drafting an amendment to the Copyright Act that would give artists a "resale right," The Art Newspaper reported.

"Our government is currently advancing work on potential amendments to the Copyright Act to further protect artists, creators and copyright holders," Champagne spokesperson Laurie Bouchard told the Globe and Mail.

"Resale rights for artists are indeed an important step toward improving economic conditions for artists in Canada."

The Canadian Artists Representation, a nonprofit that supports visual artists that has proposed such reforms, said in a statement Friday that it was pleased that the Artist's Resale Right is "gaining momentum within the federal government."

"The ARR is a royalty that enables artists to share in the wealth they create," said April Britski, the national executive director of CARFAC in the statement.

"It is particularly beneficial for Indigenous and senior artists, aligns Canada with many of our international trade partners, and it is one of many ways the federal government can help visual artists recover from the pandemic and prosper for years to come."

In an April presentation, CARFAC proposed that 5% of all eligible secondary sales of artwork sold for at least $1,000 should be paid back to the artist, noting that it "is a copyright royalty, not a tax."

"It would not be collected by the government nor would it be spent by government," the proposal reads. "Furthermore, the government would not be involved with collecting, distributing, or monitoring the payment of royalties."

The organization noted that more than 90 countries including Australia, Britain, Mexico and all members of the European Union have similar royalties for the resale of work.

The art news website Hyperallergic noted that attempts to pass similar acts in the United States have failed, including the American Royalties Too Act proposed by Democratic lawmakers in 2014.

The Art Dealers Association of Canada has argued that the royalties would create a bureaucratic burden for small galleries, The Art Newspaper reported, and could raise the price of art and reduce sales.

Today's letters: ER closures should not be accepted as 'normal'

Ottawa Citizen letters - Aug 13,2022


ER closures are not ‘normal,’ minister



Re: Ontario ER closures not unprecedented, health minister says, Aug. 8.

What a relief hearing from provincial Health Minister Sylvia Jones that ER closures are not unprecedented. We’ve failed Ontarians in the past so what’s the big deal if we are doing it again? Very comforting.

The motto in the Ontario Health Ministry must be “Strive for mediocrity.” In order to serve you better, we’ve closed this ER; please drive 80 kms to the next nearest overcrowded ER as it may be open. Best of luck.

True story: a few years ago, the notice on the door of our local bank branch said that exact thing: “In order to serve you better, we’ve closed this branch.” It must be spreading!

Garry Logue, Ottawa

What universe is the health minister living in?

Gee, I didn’t think the nurses in Ontario were all on vacation. I thought they were so overworked and underpaid that nobody wants to be a nurse anymore. I’m so glad the minister has told us the truth as she sees it from the planet she lives on far away.

Jean Currie, Ottawa


Don’t trash the single-payer system

Health Minister Sylvia Jones appears on track to continue underfunding nursing and other forms of health care and promoting private care. Decent health care can never be cheap. Fix the current single-payer system; don’t trash it.

David Palframan, M.D., Ottawa

Paramedic rules are just stupid

The biggest problem with the health-care system is that it is run by the government, which is more concerned about rules and regulations than about efficient and effective service.

Take, for example, the issue of having zero ambulances available. This is because of a stupid rule requiring paramedics (and their ambulances) to sit idle until a hospital worker takes over a patient. In one case I was waiting in hospital with my wife and there were 10 paramedics in the hallway with five patients. They were there for more than two hours. Once the hospital takes over, one or two nurses look after these five patients.

Why not have a pair of paramedics look after these patients until they are handed over? I hope that someone who cares reads this.

Greg Cameron, Ottawa

What will it take to change views on nursing?

I don’t believe many of the registered nurses from the 1980s and ’90s are still practising. So, few will remember when pay equity was the big issue.

We nurses felt we should have pay parity with police officers. No such luck. Word was, we were compared to pastry chefs. Unfortunately, nursing is still female-dominated and I don’t think it is any more valued today than in the 1990s.

I don’t know what it will take to get nurses the recognition on all levels — pay, benefit, equity and respect — they deserve. Perhaps if the whole health system gets nearer to total collapse, views will change among those in charge.

Mary Sue Boyle (proud graduate of Toronto General Hospital 1968), Kemptville

Why people are leaving nursing careers

The Citizen has carried numerous examples of the challenges facing nurses. I heard an example that sets out starkly the choice one nurse made. She left her profession to become a painter with a drywall and painting company. She is happy with her decision. The hours are regular, the pay is roughly what she had been earning and when she finishes her work day, it does not stay with her.

Gerry Van Kessel, Gatineau

Fill health-care gaps with ‘dreamers’

While Canada’s health-care spending is in line with other democracies, our results are not. Only the Americans make us look good.

We spend much more than most on administration, but we penny-pinch with nurses, beds and equipment. Wait times are horrible. ER rooms are shut down. Ambulances line up, unable to drop off patients. Nurses are leaving in droves. Thousands of jobs remain vacant. All the provinces ever do is demand more money from the federal government. But money alone will not bring our nurses back. In the long run, the health system needs a total overhaul.

Ultimately, we need a true national public health-care system, just like most other democracies. They are more efficient, effective and accountable. Of course, that would take years. In the short term, we urgently need more doctors and nurses.

Want a quick solution? In the U.S., some 280,000 health-care workers are so-called “dreamers” — undocumented immigrants. All “dreamers” by definition, have lived in the U.S. for many years with unblemished records. They are losing hope. Canada could offer them what they dream about: a job, respect and fast citizenship.

Patrick Esmonde-White, Ottawa

Related video: ER closures, wait times impacting essential care for Canadians

Duration 2:14  View on Watch

A little context on those teacher comparisons


Re: Letter, Let’s compare teachers, nurses, Aug. 8.

I heartily concur with the writer’s comments about the working conditions for nurses in Ontario. Improvement is essential, particularly in wages. I would like to clarify and add some reality, however, to her comments about the teaching profession.

She stated that teachers have three paid professional days, as if this were some kind of holiday. Not so. Professional days are working days, and they represent a very small part of the professional development that teachers pursue regularly, on their own dime.

Yes, the mandated working day for teachers is five hours, but that is five hours in front of a class, working with groups and individuals, often with very high numbers of students. Readers should have some understanding of the countless hours that go into preparing for the delivery of programs to address the learning needs of diverse students. This requires hard-earned skills and knowledge, and working nights and weekends to meet the needs of students in that five-hour class window. As for accountability, performance reviews are done every year.

The nursing profession in Ontario has been profoundly undervalued and this must be addressed. But please have a more accurate understanding of the workload teachers carry before making comparisons.

Jan Secord, Ottawa

Opinion: Urgent care needed — my week of waiting rooms in Alberta’s besieged hospitals

Calgary Herald - 

On a weekend trip for a wedding in Spruce Grove, I had the usual semi-anxious bouts of overthinking the contents of the first aid kit in the vehicle, the smaller version I keep in my purse. For over two years, I’ve been repeating the same mantra to my sons: Be careful. You do not want to end up in an emergency room right now. I should listen to my own advice.


An ambulance proceeds to the emergency room entrance of the Foothills Medical Centre on Friday, September 24, 2021.

In a thoughtless instant helping with dinner, I pick up a burner under a chafing dish, but it has already been lit. One of the guests is a paramedic and advises me to go to a hospital. My injuries have the telltale signs of third-degree burns. Someone fills a Ziplock bag with cold water and I dunk my burnt digits while my cousin drives to Misericordia Community Hospital in west Edmonton.

The triage nurse tells me the estimated wait to see a doctor is eight to 10 hours. I can’t wait, my kids are back at the wedding. I’m walking and talking so I’m OK, relatively speaking. The nurse turns away from her computer and leans in, like an old friend with a secret. She lists the supplies I should buy and tells me to see a doctor as soon as I return to Calgary.

I slosh my bag of water down the aisles of a drug store, picking up what I need. I wonder what happens to people who can’t wait eight to 10 hours, people who must work, who can’t afford $60 for gauze, ointment, waterproof tape and Second Skin. My cousin takes me back to the wedding and wraps up my fingers. I’ve missed dinner, but I’ve lost my appetite.

Back in Calgary, a volunteer at Sheldon M. Chumir Urgent Care asks me the COVID-19 screening questions and hands me a small, yellow piece of paper. He also carries a stack of red pieces. On the wall above the waiting areas are larger versions of these colours. In the farthest corner, people with red pieces look unwell.

A digital sign announces the wait time: four hours. Monitors share messages about opioid addiction and recovery. This facility is in the Beltline, my old neighbourhood, one with a diverse population including many at-risk citizens. Some patients have their worldly belongings in a shopping cart outside. It’s also sandwiched between downtown office towers and affluent communities. An older, well-dressed woman approaches the security desk asking where the Second Cup coffee shop is located. She’s meeting someone before getting vaccinations for her cruise at the travel clinic upstairs. This is Calgary.

A woman on her phone tells a young child that someone else will pick him up. On another call, she pleads with her mother to stop asking for money. She’s down to her last $40.

A young man introduces himself to the man in the next chair, a new Canadian from India. They talk about hospitals, the Chumir and Rockyview being the two best choices for ER visits, in the young man’s opinion. He’s a cook at a restaurant downtown.

They talk about the Calgary Stampede, how expensive it is, how the city changes for 10 days, and not always in a good way

.
“You don’t want to be in the ER during Stampede,” says the cook.

When my name is called, I explain my situation to a young doctor. I tell him I feel stupid for what happened, but on the upside, I kept my right hand out of the human soup at the World Water Park the day after I injured myself. He laughs and I’m relieved that he doesn’t scold me for taking three kids to a wave pool with third-degree burns on my hand.

He must debride the burnt tissue, which will require freezing the affected fingers first. I feel nauseous.

The doctor suggests I don’t watch the procedure. I look away and he makes conversation to take my mind off what’s happening. We discuss the diversity of the patients he sees, how he’s from Edmonton but studied medicine in Calgary. I say he’s a superhero for doing what he does, under increasingly deteriorating conditions. He says the real superheroes are the social workers.

“I remember the moment I realized how Calgary differs from Edmonton. I was in med school, meeting friends at a craft beer place. It was packed, but I got a table just as people were leaving. A man in a nice suit approached and offered me a 150 bucks for my table.” The doctor shakes his head, “I was a student. I took the money. But in that moment, I learned a lot about Calgary.”

The next day, I take a seat in the waiting room of the burn unit at Foothills Medical Centre. A man waits with both arms, both hands, and all 10 fingers bandaged. Perspective smarts like a needle in the thumb.

Two nurses are in the corner, talking. One of them says she “finally had to call in sick” because she had only slept four hours the past three days. They talk about feeling overwhelmed and stressed out. They’re running on fumes.

I’m taught how to care for the wounds. The nurse is impressed with the bandaging done at the Chumir. She wishes they had the same materials, but supply chain issues are such that they have “run out of almost everything.” She puts breathable pads and little compression sleeves on my fingers. They look like tiny leg warmers.

After a follow-up trip to the burn unit, it has cost me just over $150 to treat this injury, including supplies, a prescription ointment and many hours of parking.

What stands out to me with each hospital is the positivity. You would never guess that these workers have come through 2½ years of unprecedented challenges brought on by the global pandemic or that they’re working without the proper items to care for their patients due to supply chain issues.

Every patient was given the same level of respect, whether they were in designer shoes or wearing their only set of clothes. The waiting rooms held diverse Albertans from eight to 80 years old, and everyone was greeted with caring interest. There was no tone of jaded exasperation or bad morale. There was no evidence of a broken system or a group of workers who, arguably, have few reasons for optimism. I witnessed high quality of care provided by people who have every reason to be angry, frustrated and fed up.

The South Calgary Health Centre has just announced a reduction in patient intake hours for urgent care due to staffing challenges. The Airdrie Community Health Centre recently began weekend overnight closures of the urgent care centre for eight weeks due to a lack of doctors. Rural hospitals around the province are cutting back hours.

We are a province with many financially comfortable citizens, but many of our neighbours are folks who don’t have money for their own medical supplies, people who must decide if they can afford to take a day off work to wait for a doctor. It only makes sense that a province with this much wealth takes care of its most vulnerable to ensure these top-notch health-care workers remain here, caring for the health of all Albertans.

Heidi Klaassen is a Calgary writer and editor.