Health & Wellness

“Lead the Way!”—a workshop to encourage women aged 55-70 to be more physically active—will be held Tuesday, Feb. 22 at the Fort Frances Public Library Technology Centre.

“Beyond the Pill” is this year’s theme for the ninth-annual Sexual and Reproductive Health Day, taking place on Feb. 12 this year.

Public health nurses from the Northwestern Health Unit will be targeting high school-aged youth throughout the region during the weeks of Feb. 7 and 14.

Influenza, or the ’flu, is a disease caused by a virus. Symptoms include fever, body aches, severe fatigue, and cough.

Symptoms generally last up to a week, but it may be two or more weeks before a person feels well again.

Some people with the ’flu may experience vomiting or diarrhea, but if these are the only symptoms, a person likely has some other type of infection.

FORT FRANCES—Carrying on with its strategic plan implemented last year, the Northwestern Health Unit will continue to focus on accountability, fiscal responsibility, partnerships, and measurable goals in 2011.

Some good news for district municipalities is that there will be no health unit levy increase this year.

Some 168 physicians and nurse practitioners are now receiving patient reports electronically from 12 hospitals in the North West Local Health Integration Network (NW LHIN) through the Physician Office Integration (POI) program.

Students are being encouraged to show how they can make their schools healthier.

Now in its fifth year, the Healthy Schools Recognition Program encourages school communities to pledge to do something healthy, such as:

•planting a vegetable garden on school grounds;

•establishing a daily running or walking club;

•starting a recycling or composting program; or

Whether used to identify lung disease or monitor the effectiveness of asthma treatments, spirometry is a commonly-performed breathing test to measure the lungs’ capacity to move air in or out of the them.

Ontario’s investments in cancer care are producing results and have established the province as a global leader, according to a new international study.

The study, published in “The Lancet,” looked at survival rates for four cancers—lung, breast, colorectal, and ovarian—in six countries.

Ontario is helping families stay healthy and save money by providing greater access to a variety of health services.

Ontario’s publicly-funded immunization program is helping families save up to $790 per child while providing protection to pre-school aged children against 12 different diseases.

An online survey of “baby boomers” across Canada conducted by the Alzheimer Society reveals a worrying lack of awareness about Alzheimer’s disease.

Survey results show an astonishing 23 percent of “boomers” can’t name any of the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease—even though their risk doubles every five years after age 65.