Toronto’s Bedbug Crisis

“It was a really stressful, stressful time. I couldn’t sleep at night,” says Caryn Solly, who was covered in itchy red bumps when bedbugs infested her apartment building in 2004. “I was sleeping with long-sleeved shirts tucked into my pants and those pants tucked into socks with the AC cranked super-high. I had to do lots of laundry and had several exterminator treatments to get rid of them.” Despite short-term relief, the bloodsucking bugs crept back into her Brooklyn, New York complex three years later.

Stories like Solly’s are being broadcasted across North America, including the GTA, a region that’s seen a troubling hike in bedbug reports. On September 29, Toronto MPP Mike Colle held a summit at Queen’s Park to address an issue that’s been irking communities of every class. Read more

Injections, Ejections: The H1N1 Enigma

Over the last couple of months, hello-kisses and pleasantries of ‘how are you?’ and ‘can you believe this weather’ have been replaced by distant smiles and rhetoric fringed with panic and utter confusion. All this – while worshiped Purell dispensers of a palpable deity status not seen since SARS’s heyday, oust Holy Water at religious gatherings.

Since health officials declared in October the ‘Second Wave’ of a pandemic that was first reported in Mexico this past spring – the 2009 flu pandemic, a.k.a. swine flu and politically appropriate, H1N1 influenza virus – the hottest topic these days is whether to sink or swim with the biggest mass vaccination program that has sloshed and frothed onto Canadian shores. Read more