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The article is titled “B.C. youth H5N1 diagnosis: Anti-whistleblower “ag-gag” laws help global pandemics grow and spread.” It was originally published on November 28, 2024 and is authored by Anelyse Weiler, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Victoria and Tayler Zavitz, PhD candidate, Animals & Society Research Initiative, University of Victoria.

A teen in British Columbia recently became critically ill after becoming infected with H5N1. H5N1 is a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu.
Outbreaks of avian influenza (bird flu) in livestock and flocks on industrial-scale chicken and dairy farms — so called factory farms — in the United States are raising alarm bells for public health across the world.
Mainstream commercial animal agriculture is conducted in an intensive way in often cramped and unhygienic environments. These conditions are ideal for new viruses to jump from animals to humans.
Beyond potentially lethal pathogens, the conditions in factory farms also raise concerns about air and water contamination and greenhouse gas pollution that exacerbates climate change. Meanwhile, dangerous conditions for workers and considerable animal suffering add compounding concerns for an already controversial industry.
Often, the only light shed on these shadowy, dirty and densely populated spaces comes from hidden-camera investigations by journalists, activists and whistleblower employees. But new laws in Canada — often referred to as “agriculture-gag” laws — are making such investigations illegal.
These laws do a disservice to all Canadians.
Documenting cruelty
In 2020, a worker nicknamed Elijah wired himself with a hidden camera to secretly record conditions at Paragon Farms, a large-scale pig breeding facility in Putnam, Ont. Elijah’s exposé showed a worker carving open the abdomen of a conscious pregnant pig to obtain her live piglets.
The pig in question had suffered from a prolapse and, instead of being humanely euthanized, was kept alive until her piglets were viable outside the womb. Once the piglets were just old enough to survive long enough to be slaughtered for meat, the mother was subject to an illegal C-section — without anesthesia. Only at this point was she finally put out of her misery and euthanized.
For weeks, Elijah documented additional footage, including pigs allegedly being deprived of water for days and being kicked in the face.
After the footage was broadcast on CTV’s W5, Paragon Farms was charged and pleaded guilty to animal cruelty, resulting in a $20,000 fine.
The Paragon Farms exposé led to some industry accountability. But shortly after the footage went public, the Ontario government responded in a puzzling way. Instead of strengthening regulations for animal agriculture, it criminalized whistleblowers who expose these conditions by adopting an “ag-gag” law.
Ag-gagged
Ag-gag laws refer to various types of legislation meant to discourage undercover journalists, activists and/or whistleblower activities in farms or slaughterhouses. Today, if an undercover journalist wants to film conditions on a factory farm, they may face stiff penalties.
In the past several years, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and P.E.I. have all adopted “ag-gag” legislation. Federally, ag-gag bills have been introduced twice. Though neither attempt has been successful.
Legal experts in Canada have raised concerns that ag-gag laws hinder freedom of speech and may be unconstitutional. However, pressure from agribusiness has led governments across the globe, such as Australia and the United States, to adopt various types of ag-gag laws.
The modern model of ag-gag laws is the brainchild of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a U.S.-based conservative think tank. ALEC first drafted model ag-gag legislation in the 1990s to criminalize undercover activities in animal agriculture facilities.
Our recent research shows that Canadian farm industry groups have also strongly supported ag-gag laws. At the same time, Canadian governments have exhibited a close, collaborative relationship with industry groups. This is an unhealthy relationship for both people and animals.
Hidden-camera investigations of farms and slaughterhouses from whistleblowers like Elijah can inspire public deliberation and reflection. Researchers believe that emotions like moral disgust can spur societies to become less violent — including towards animals.
On the flip side, ag-gag laws prevent people from confronting potentially distressing information about both legal and illegal practices in animal agriculture. On the surface this seems like a win for industry. However, research has shown that the perceived lack of transparency actually causes a drop in trust and increased support for tougher animal welfare regulations.
Scenes of animal abuse lead to public outrage, while silencing whistleblowers gives the impression that the industry must have something to hide. In other words, ag-gag laws are not the solution — behaving humanely and ending cruelty to animals is.
Promoting bio-insecurity
So, how do governments justify ag-gag laws?
In our research we found that Canadian governments chiefly cite biosecurity as the justification for ag-gag laws. They claim that whistleblowers and animal activists could spread diseases. To our knowledge, there is no evidence that whistleblowers or animal activists have ever spread animal-borne diseases in this way.
Meanwhile, modern animal agriculture is itself a hotbed for diseases like avian influenza — including H5N1. Viruses spread and mutate easily in concentrated populations of chickens, dairy cows and pigs.
Industry and government officials have also painted animal activists as “domestic terrorists” who pose a threat to farmers and their children. Likewise, such claims appear to be baseless.
Despite the power of the agricultural industry, non-profit organizations like the Ontario-based Animal Justice have won some victories in pushing back-against ag-gag laws.
Instead of shielding animal agriculture from public scrutiny and deterring dissent, governments should shift away from an animal welfare regime that expects industry to voluntarily regulate itself.
Governments should adopt more rigorous, mandatory and proactively enforced regulations such as reducing overcrowding on farms. Such interventions would not only align with contemporary values for the humane treatment of animals, but could also prevent the next pandemic.

B.C. youth H5N1 diagnosis: Anti-whistleblower “ag-gag” laws help global pandemics grow and spread

The article is titled “Danielle Smith’s new policies make all Albertan youth unsafe.” It was originally published on November 25, 2024 and is authored by Florence Ashley, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law and John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre, University of Alberta and 
JJ Wright, Assistant Professor, Education, MacEwan University.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government recently tabled three bills targeting trans youth’s education, health care and sports participation. If passed, these ill-considered bills — the Education Amendment Act, the Health Statutes Amendment Act and the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act — could make all Albertan youth unsafe.
Smith has said the bills are aimed at protecting youth from harm, but the proposed laws have already met significant condemnation since they were announced in February.
The government’s restrictions on gender-affirming care were decried by the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Paediatric Society, the Alberta Medical Association and more than 80 other organizations across Canada.
Saskatchewan and New Brunswick’s near-identical policies on name and pronoun changes in schools have been criticized for violating children’s rights by the Children’s Advocates of both provinces. A Saskatchewan court has also concluded that youth affected by the policies “will suffer irreparable harm.”
Sex education eradication
The harms posed to trans youth are more than enough reason to abandon these bills. However, trans youth are not the only victims of these reckless policies.
The province’s Education Amendment Act will effectively eradicate sex education in the province, and the proposed Fairness and Safety in Sport Act will make all female athletes vulnerable to abuse.
While the Education Amendment Act purports to introduce a parental opt-in system of sex education — instead of the current opt-out system — the requirements are so burdensome that the quality of sex education will inevitably erode significantly. Many schools will probably choose not to offer sex education at all.
Not only must all teaching materials be approved by the government — with its evident hostility towards sexual education — but parental consent must be sought 30 days in advance and alternative instruction provided to students whose parents do not consent.
This outcome flies in the face of the 85 per cent of Canadian parents who believe they cannot effectively teach their children about sex and favour school-based sexual education.
Depriving kids of knowledge
The government’s attack on sex education goes against decades of research demonstrating that age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education — unlike abstinence-only sex education — reduces teen pregnancy rates and STIs and supports the reduction of child sexual abuse.
Smith’s attack on sex education will deprive children of knowledge on anatomy and consent, which they need to better communicate experiences of sexual harassment and violence. By denying youth this much-needed information, the law will turn the clock back decades in the fight against sexual violence — and make Alberta children far more vulnerable to it.
The law would also apply to materials and lessons regarding gender identity and sexual orientation, potentially erasing same-sex families and gender-diverse children from the curriculum. Although these kinds of policies are most harmful to queer and trans students, studies show that developing accepting attitudes towards 2SLGBTQ+ students also benefits the mental health of heterosexual, non-transgender students.
Abuse of athletes
As for the proposed Fairness and Safety in Sport Act, it will make all female athletes vulnerable to abuse, especially if they are perceived as “too masculine.”
Under the law, schools and sports associations will have to adopt eligibility requirements based on gender. To facilitate enforcement of eligibility rules, the bill grants legal immunity to athletes, referees and employees of the government, schools or sports association — as long as they are intending in good faith to enforce the law.
In other words, the law protects those who use the rules as an excuse to harass and abuse athletes.
This is troublesome. In British Columbia recently, a female basketball player was verbally and physically mistreated by the opposing players and coach for being trans.
Last year, a nine-year-old girl participating in track-and-field in B.C. was harassed by people who thought she was trans for having short hair.
And the world watched the vitriol directed at Algerian boxer Imane Khelif during the Summer Olympics — abuse that’s been directed at so many successful female athletes before her, often with more than a whiff of racism.
The government is giving a free pass to harassers in the name of protecting women’s sports. This makes all women unsafe, especially Black, Indigenous and other racialized women, as well as women who are considered insufficiently feminine.
This is a far greater threat than any athletic advantage trans women supposedly pose to other athletes — the evidence for which is far from compelling, especially when compared to advantages we readily accept, such as height in basketball.
Targeting a minority
The children of Alberta deserve better.
They deserve a government that respects their rights. They deserve a government that actually makes them safer, rather than a government that tries to distract us from its failures by targeting the latest unpopular minority.
Instead of persecuting children, why doesn’t Smith stop selling the province’s health-care system for parts by privatizing hospital operations and address the growing housing and affordability crisis?
At a time when it is getting harder and harder for Albertans to enjoy life in the province due to rising prices, the last thing we need the government to focus on is undermining children’s rights.

Danielle Smith’s new policies make all Albertan youth unsafe

The article is titled “Resiliency and concussion: Why do some athletes develop neurodegeneration and others don’t?.” It was originally published on September 26, 2024  and is authored by Ravi Menon, Professor of Medical Biophysics at Western University.

Ontario’s Minister of Sport, 71-year-old Neil Lumsden, recently announced his decision to donate his brain to the Concussion Legacy Foundation Canada to support research on brain injuries.
Lumsden played 10 years in the Canadian Football League, winning four Grey Cups and while he knows he had his “bell rung” a number of times during his career, he doesn’t believe he has had any long-term neurological damage. Helping researchers find out why his brain seems to be more resilient than some of his teammates motivated his decision.
As if on cue, on September 24, 54-year-old National Football League Hall of Famer Brett Favre revealed during unrelated testimony before the United States congress that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, likely as a result of hundreds of concussions experienced during his storied career.
Why have these two athletes had such different outcomes?
Assessing and managing concussion
While we have some tools to assess and manage concussions at the acute phase, we don’t have much at our disposal to monitor long-term progression. In the acute phase, concussions are not visible on conventional MRI or CT scans. This is one of the reasons a concussion is also called a “mild” traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Such scans are only sparingly used to rule out more severe TBI consequences such as brain bleeds.
While there are some potential blood-based biomarkers for diagnosing acute concussion, there are very few broadly accessible tools to study the long-term biological effects on brain cellular and molecular function. These functions likely govern an individual’s trajectory towards neurodegeneration, a journey that can take years or decades.
The risk of neurodegeneration — a progressive loss of structure or function of neurons — increases with the frequency and severity of concussions. An individual does not even have to be concussed for brain damage to be observed. Repeated subconcussive impacts have been shown by the group I work with at the Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping and others to produce persistent changes in brain structure and function in young female athletes as well as in blood biomarkers in young male athletes.
Both these studies used more sophisticated MRI approaches, including resting-state functional MRI which reveals how brain areas communicate with each other, and diffusion tensor imaging that measures the physical integrity of the connections between brain areas.
Fortunately, we think most of the study subjects will not go on to develop neurodegenerative disorders, but we don’t understand why some like Favre do and others like Lumsden don’t.
From human and animal studies, we do understand some of the major biological consequences of head impacts that may pave the way for neurodegeneration. Chronic inflammation has been linked to the development of neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, where neurons progressively die.
Tau protein tangles disrupt the normal functioning of neurons and are one of the hallmark features of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease linked to repeated head injuries. CTE is known to cause memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression and eventually dementia. CTE can be present in the brains of people who had repeated hits, but never had a diagnosed concussion, such as former Penn football captain Owen Thomas.
CTE often is observed in younger populations (like Thomas) but can only be diagnosed postmortem. A recent survey in the NFL showed that one-third of retired players believe they have CTE based on symptoms, and almost 10 per cent already had a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or other dementias. Subtle shearing or stretching of axons — the long, filament-like parts of neurons that carry signals between brain cells — can occur with impacts. Over time, damaged axons may degenerate, contributing to brain atrophy (shrinkage) and cognitive decline.
Our own research shows that the longer axon bundles that connect distant areas of the brain are damaged and that this damage can accumulate with each subsequent injury. Axons are the threadlike extensions of neurons that transmit electrical impulses between brain areas, often grouped together in bundles.
The brain is normally protected by a structure called the blood-brain barrier, which tightly regulates the entry and exit of metabolites and waste products in the brain. After one or more impacts, the blood-brain barrier can become damaged, allowing toxic proteins, chemicals and cells to infiltrate the brain. This can trigger a destructive cycle of inflammation and cell death, setting the stage for long-term neurodegeneration.
Many of these factors can be measured in research settings using positron emission tomography scans, or various advanced forms of MRI. Some of these may have predictive power for resilience in the future. Genetic predisposition may be important. People carrying the APOE4 gene or the alpha-synuclein Rep 1 promotor allele may be more at risk for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, respectively, after repeated hits. Other studies have not found such a link.
It is clear that some brains are able to compensate at various levels. This process is likely linked to what is called cognitive reserve, which is the ability of a brain to maintain cognitive function in the face of advancing disease or injury. It has been linked to genetics, level of education, social interactions and health status. It likely depends on the brain’s ability to reroute information, much like a traffic detour — something we can measure with functional MRI. Patients with higher cognitive reserves have better postconcussive outcomes, at least in the short term.
A concussion might be considered a “mild” injury, but its effects can last a lifetime, especially when multiple impacts occur. This is why understanding concussions and their long-term effects is important for predicting who might suffer from neurodegeneration.

Ontario’s Minister of Sport, 71-year-old Neil Lumsden, recently announced his decision to donate his brain to the Concussion Legacy Foundation Canada to support research on brain injuries.
Lumsden played 10 years in the Canadian Football League, winning four Grey Cups and while he knows he had his “bell rung” a number of times during his career, he doesn’t believe he has had any long-term neurological damage. Helping researchers find out why his brain seems to be more resilient than some of his teammates motivated his decision.
As if on cue, on Sept. 24, 54-year-old National Football League Hall of Famer Brett Favre revealed during unrelated testimony before the United States congress that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, likely as a result of hundreds of concussions experienced during his storied career.
Why have these two athletes had such different outcomes?
Assessing and managing concussion
While we have some tools to assess and manage concussions at the acute phase, we don’t have much at our disposal to monitor long-term progression. In the acute phase, concussions are not visible on conventional MRI or CT scans. This is one of the reasons a concussion is also called a “mild” traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Such scans are only sparingly used to rule out more severe TBI consequences such as brain bleeds.
While there are some potential blood-based biomarkers for diagnosing acute concussion, there are very few broadly accessible tools to study the long-term biological effects on brain cellular and molecular function. These functions likely govern an individual’s trajectory towards neurodegeneration, a journey that can take years or decades.
The risk of neurodegeneration — a progressive loss of structure or function of neurons — increases with the frequency and severity of concussions. An individual does not even have to be concussed for brain damage to be observed. Repeated subconcussive impacts have been shown by the group I work with at the Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping and others to produce persistent changes in brain structure and function in young female athletes as well as in blood biomarkers in young male athletes.
Both these studies used more sophisticated MRI approaches, including resting-state functional MRI which reveals how brain areas communicate with each other, and diffusion tensor imaging that measures the physical integrity of the connections between brain areas.
Fortunately, we think most of the study subjects will not go on to develop neurodegenerative disorders, but we don’t understand why some like Favre do and others like Lumsden don’t.
From human and animal studies, we do understand some of the major biological consequences of head impacts that may pave the way for neurodegeneration. Chronic inflammation has been linked to the development of neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, where neurons progressively die.
Tau protein tangles disrupt the normal functioning of neurons and are one of the hallmark features of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease linked to repeated head injuries. CTE is known to cause memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression and eventually dementia. CTE can be present in the brains of people who had repeated hits, but never had a diagnosed concussion, such as former Penn football captain Owen Thomas.
CTE often is observed in younger populations (like Thomas) but can only be diagnosed postmortem. A recent survey in the NFL showed that one-third of retired players believe they have CTE based on symptoms, and almost 10 per cent already had a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or other dementias. Subtle shearing or stretching of axons — the long, filament-like parts of neurons that carry signals between brain cells — can occur with impacts. Over time, damaged axons may degenerate, contributing to brain atrophy (shrinkage) and cognitive decline.
Our own research shows that the longer axon bundles that connect distant areas of the brain are damaged and that this damage can accumulate with each subsequent injury. Axons are the threadlike extensions of neurons that transmit electrical impulses between brain areas, often grouped together in bundles.
The brain is normally protected by a structure called the blood-brain barrier, which tightly regulates the entry and exit of metabolites and waste products in the brain. After one or more impacts, the blood-brain barrier can become damaged, allowing toxic proteins, chemicals and cells to infiltrate the brain. This can trigger a destructive cycle of inflammation and cell death, setting the stage for long-term neurodegeneration.
Many of these factors can be measured in research settings using positron emission tomography scans, or various advanced forms of MRI. Some of these may have predictive power for resilience in the future. Genetic predisposition may be important. People carrying the APOE4 gene or the alpha-synuclein Rep 1 promotor allele may be more at risk for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, respectively, after repeated hits. Other studies have not found such a link.
It is clear that some brains are able to compensate at various levels. This process is likely linked to what is called cognitive reserve, which is the ability of a brain to maintain cognitive function in the face of advancing disease or injury. It has been linked to genetics, level of education, social interactions and health status. It likely depends on the brain’s ability to reroute information, much like a traffic detour — something we can measure with functional MRI. Patients with higher cognitive reserves have better postconcussive outcomes, at least in the short term.
A concussion might be considered a “mild” injury, but its effects can last a lifetime, especially when multiple impacts occur. This is why understanding concussions and their long-term effects is important for predicting who might suffer from neurodegeneration.

Resiliency and concussion: Why do some athletes develop neurodegeneration and others don’t?

October 4, 2024

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