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Missing 3-year-old boy found dead in creek in Mississauga, Ont.: police
A three-year-old boy has been found dead a day after he went missing in a park in Mississauga, Ont., Peel police say.
Flu season has officially begun in Canada, the federal public health agency said on Friday.
"At the national level, influenza activity has crossed the seasonal threshold, indicating the start of influenza season," the Public Health Agency of Canada said in its weekly FluWatch report posted online.
The rate of tests that were positive for flu stayed above five per cent for two consecutive weeks.
As of Nov. 25, 7.5 per cent of people tested for influenza across Canada were positive.
The number of cases is climbing, said Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious diseases specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.
"If you plan to get a flu vaccine, now is a really good time to do it," she said in an interview.
"The flu season starting now tells you that there's going to be a lot of flu at the end of December and the beginning of January," McGeer said, noting the flu shot takes about two weeks to prime people's immune systems.
"That's when you want to be out with your friends and doing a bunch of things and, you know, flu is capable of making that time quite miserable."
Not all provinces and territories are reporting a five per cent positivity rate yet. For example, Public Health Ontario's latest flu surveillance report said the rate was 2.8 per cent as of Nov. 25 in that province.
But Ontario and other provinces will soon catch up and those rates will increase, McGeer said.
The dominant strain now will be influenza A type H1N1, which is a good match for the current vaccine, she said.
Many adults have some level of resistance to H1N1 flu strains, so it "tends to cause a lot of disease in kids, especially unvaccinated kids," McGeer said.
She added that "emergency departments and pediatrics ... take more of the pressure" during H1N1-dominant flu seasons.
Although McGeer said it's important for people to get their flu vaccines, she's even more concerned about the levels of COVID-19 that are circulating this year.
Friday's surveillance report from Public Health Ontario showed a test positivity rate of 20 per cent for COVID-19 in that province.
In addition to test positivity, wastewater surveillance and hospitalizations show climbing COVID-19 cases in Canada, McGeer said.
"Just because we've stopped talking about people being hospitalized with COVID does not mean that people aren't being hospitalized with COVID," she said.
"At the rate we're going, there will be more people hospitalized with COVID and more people dying from COVID this year than last year," McGeer said, noting that a low uptake of the new COVID XBB-variant vaccine is worrisome.
A three-year-old boy has been found dead a day after he went missing in a park in Mississauga, Ont., Peel police say.
Against the rainy Paris night sky, Celine Dion staged the comeback of her career with a powerful performance from the Eiffel Tower to open the Olympic Games.
Premier Danielle Smith said Friday afternoon in Hinton while weather conditions are cooler, the Jasper fire is still considered out of control and that Jasper residents can expect to be away from their homes 'for several weeks.'
An Irish museum will withdraw a waxwork of singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor just one day after installing it, following a backlash from her family and the public, it told CNN in a statement on Friday.
A Winnipeg senior is getting soaked with a six-figure water bill.
Nearly two weeks after Donald Trump's near assassination, the FBI confirmed Friday that it was indeed a bullet that struck the former president's ear, moving to clear up conflicting accounts about what caused the former president's injuries after a gunman opened fire at a Pennsylvania rally.
Orillia OPP arrested and charged a driver with impaired driving after flashing their high beams.
A powerful Mexican drug cartel leader who eluded authorities for decades was duped into flying into the U.S., where he was arrested alongside a son of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, according to a U.S. law enforcement official familiar with the matter.
The lawyer for a former judge whose claims to be Cree were questioned in a CBC investigation says his client is not considering legal action against the broadcaster after the Law Society of British Columbia this week backed her claims of Indigenous heritage.
As fire threatened people in Jasper National Park, Colleen Knull sprung into action.
Video posted to social media on Thursday morning appears to show the charred remains of a Jasper, Alta., neighbourhood.
A Saskatchewan-born veteran of the Second World War was recently presented with France's highest national order.
A local First Nations elder and veteran is helping to bring the Ojibwe language to a well-known film for the first time.
A cat who fled her Montreal home nearly a decade ago has been reunited with her family after being found in Ottawa.
A woman in Waterloo, Ont. is out thousands of dollars for a car crash she wasn’t involved in.
A swarm of bees living in a lamppost in Winnipeg’s Sage Creek neighbourhood has found a new home for its hive.
Around 100 acres of Manitoba Crown Land near the Saskatchewan border is being returned to the Métis community.
Nova Scotia is suspending the licensed Cape Breton moose hunt for three years due to what the province is calling a “significant drop” in the population.