Free Republic

A Canadian study released Wednesday found that many provinces in our neighbor to the North have seen patients fleeing the country and opting for medical treatment in the United States. The nonpartisan Fraser Institute reported that 46,159 Canadians sought medical treatment outside of Canada in 2011, as wait times increased 104 percent — more than double — compared with statistics from 1993. Specialist physicians surveyed across 12 specialties and 10 provinces reported an average total wait time of 19 weeks between the time a general practitioner refers a patient and the time a specialist provides elective treatment — the longest...

Supplies of a type of BCG used to treat bladder cancer have been completely halted due to a flood at a factory in Canada. The bacterium, which stimulates the immune system to fight cancer, is used on about 6,000 patients a year. In more than half of them it can stop cancer spreading almost indefinitely. But Sanofi Pastuer, which makes the most widely-used product, called Immunocyst, does not expect production to restart before late 2013, according to a letter to doctors from Professor Sir Mike Richards, the NHS cancer ‘csar’. He warned it was now “almost inevitable” that patients would...