Month: April 2020

MONTREAL — Premier Francois Legault says most Quebec stores as well as companies operating in construction and manufacturing will gradually be allowed to reopen in the coming weeks.

Under the plan, stores outside Montreal can reopen next Monday while those in the greater Montreal region will reopen May 11. Stores in shopping malls will remain closed, unless they can be accessed from outside.

Legault says the reopening of stores and other businesses will depend on physical distancing rules being respected.

“Our challenge is to gradually restart the economy without restarting the pandemic,” Legault told reporters in Quebec City.

He said the process will be staggered.

“The idea is to gradually add workers and analyze the effect on the contagion,” he said. “But one thing is clear: If we want our plan to work, we need to continue our efforts of physical distancing, and we need to continue to protect the most vulnerable.”

Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said 1.2 million Quebecers have had to temporarily stop work since the province was put “on pause” last month to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

He said the situation is stabilizing in most regions, and the measures announced Tuesday were drafted in consultation with organizations responsible for public health and worker safety.

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Fitzgibbon warned that if COVID-19 trends worsen, he won’t hesitate to restore the restrictions.

Under the plan, manufacturers will resume operations beginning May 11 with initial limits on the number of employees. He said the construction industry will completely reopen starting May 11.

The recovery strategy for businesses comes a day after Premier Francois Legault announced elementary schools and daycares across the province would be reopened by May 19.

The province has reported 25,757 cases of COVID-19 to date and 1,682 deaths, more than half the national total.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 28, 2020.

LAS VEGAS ― Slot machines are powered down, casinos boarded up and barricaded.

Sidewalks are largely deserted and electronic marquees that once flashed neon calls for nightclubs, magic shows and topless revues instead beam sombre messages of safety.

The famous fountains of the Bellagio casino, where water choreographed to lights and music shoots hundreds of feet in the air, are still. Throngs of visitors who made it tough to manoeuvr on sidewalks have been replaced by the occasional jogger or skateboarder.

On the always busy, always noisy, never sleeping Las Vegas strip, you can now hear birds chirping.

“It’s crazy,″ said Chris Morehouse, a 70-year-old Elvis impersonator who spent a recent afternoon sipping Miller High Life and posing with a few locals who took advantage of the eerie silence to take photos at the neon-bedecked welcome sign on the Las Vegas Strip. “It’s like the end of the world.”

Instead of hosting throngs of visitors for one of the busiest seasons of the year, with March Madness drawing swarms to sportsbooks, or the now-scuttled plan to host the NFL draft this weekend, ferrying players in boats to a red carpet stage on the Bellagio lake, Las Vegas is trying to survive.

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Nevada’s tourism, leisure, hospitality and gambling industry accounts for one in three jobs in the state ― making the state more dependent on tourism than Alaska on oil.

Workers are expected to lose $7.7 billion in wages and salaries over the next 18 months if the tourism industry is shuttered between 30 and 90 days, according to a study from the Nevada Resort Association.

 

With the industry effectively closed for more than five weeks now, more than 343,000 residents have filed for unemployment, and state and local governments could lose more than $1 billion in tax revenues.

The politically independent mayor of Las Vegas, Carolyn Goodman, has issued public pleas calling for the Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak to end the statewide shutdown of casinos and non-essential businesses, which she calls “total insanity.”

“For heaven’s sake,″ Goodman said at an April city council meeting, “being closed is killing us already, and killing Las Vegas, our industry, our convention and tourism business that we have all worked so hard to build.”

Sisolak has declined to give a date for when he’ll start easing restrictions, saying the state has to see at least two weeks of declines in deaths and new cases, along with more widespread testing and tracking, with before he will start gradually easing rules.

Sisolak said in an interview on CNN Wednesday night that he didn’t want workers to have to choose between their paycheque and their life and noted that the casino workers’ union has reported 11 deaths among its ranks due to the virus.

“We will rebuild our economy. Las Vegas will continue to thrive. But I can’t do that if I lose more people,” he said.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, and death. The vast majority of people recover.

So far, the casino closures are expected to extend at least into May, leaving workers like Kimberly Ireland struggling to find a way to hang on.

The 49-year-old was laid off from her job as a bell desk dispatcher at the Mirage casino-resort, where she worked for a decade.

She’s living off her savings and the unemployment, and also supporting her adult daughter, who is on an unpaid maternity leave, and a new grandson, who was born days after the casinos were shuttered.

“Money is running out. It’s getting low for the majority of us,” she said.

Ireland said workers at her casino weren’t given any guidance about when they’d be back or what it might be like then they return. For now, she doesn’t think Las Vegas is ready.

“Everybody wants to get back to business. Everybody wants to get back to semi-normal,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s safe.”

Victor Chicas, a restaurant server in the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel, was facing foreclosure on his home before the virus shut down the city and the 54-year-old was laid off.

He immediately ended his cable and internet service to cut his expenses and drained his swimming pool to trim his electric bill. He’s still waiting to find out if his home loan modification will be approved and if he’ll get a chance to try to keep his house, while also supporting his sister and her two children, who immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala.

“Now when we come back,” he said, “I’m going to be underwater.”

Like Ireland, said he wishes his employer would pay him through the shutdown but disagrees with the mayor’s call to reopen Las Vegas.

“Life is more important than anything else,” he said. “You’re not going to buy life with money.”

While about 24 per cent of the state’s workforce has filed for unemployment benefits since March 21, that doesn’t include waves of others who haven’t been able to get through the overburdened system. Nor does it include the self-employed and gig workers, who are newly eligible for benefits under a federal aid package that the state is scrambling to accommodate. Nevada officials say the state may not have a website ready for them to seek benefits until mid-May.

Those who rely on the amusements of Las Vegas in non-traditional ways are trying to find a way to endure.

Wearing a white, rhinestone-studded jumpsuit, a thick black wig, a gold chain shining on his bare chest and sunglasses to match, Morehouse, the Elvis impersonator, has seized on the sunny weather and the restless locals visiting one of the few tourist attractions still open amid the COVID-19 outbreak ― the iconic “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign. He’s brought a speaker to perform karaoke and a few cans of beer, which he sips as he sings and sways in the open-air park as people in groups of twos and threes still come up to take a photo with the sign.

While foot traffic is light, Morehouse hopes he might lure curious drivers to pull over.

“They see an Elvis here. They think something’s going on,″ he said. “I’m like the sign.”

At dusk falls and dim lights start to glow, many locals slowly drive several miles of the Strip, with their car windows rolled down and phones raised to photograph and film America’s most flamboyant party reduced to a vacant, muted spectacle, a post-apocalyptic remnant of a time before social distancing and stay-at-home orders, when excess and wild attractions were the main draw.

Brandy Little, a 35-year-old economist and Las Vegas native, said she cried the first time she drove the empty Strip during the shutdown, knowing how devastating it is for the city.

“It wouldn’t have been bad if we were only briefly in it,” she said of the coronravirus. “But the whole world is really being hit by it, and we rely on the world to come here and play. If they’re hurting, they might not come and play.”

MONTREAL — Melina Plante has found that, on her five-hectare fruit and vegetable farm south of Montreal by the U.S. border, one experienced Guatemalan farmhand can produce more than two Quebecers.

She and her husband, Francois D’Aoust, have hired the same four Guatemalan seasonal workers year after year. They typically clock up to 70 hours per week on the farm in Havelock, Que., and though the pay is relatively low, the workers value it.

But this year, Plante said, the farmhands are stuck in Guatemala due to travel restrictions their country has imposed to limit the spread of COVID-19.

They are among the roughly 5,000 seasonal and temporary workers that Quebec’s farmers’ union estimates will be missing on the province’s farms this year because of the pandemic, leaving Plante, D’Aoust and scores of other farmers with a tough choice: They can either reduce this year’s food production or take a chance on inexperienced but eager Quebecers thrown out of work by the pandemic.

In response to the foreign labour shortage, the provincial government on April 17 announced a $45-million program to pay an extra $100 a week above regular wages as an incentive to work on a farm. About 2,800 Quebecers have so far responded to Premier Francois Legault’s call.

But it is still unclear if there are enough unemployed Quebecers able and willing to do the work — and whether those who do will stick around if the economy picks up and their old jobs return.

Plante said bluntly that in the past, Quebecers have proven unreliable farmhands.

“That’s been our experience — and why we turned to foreign labour …. We estimate that one Guatemalan worker can be replaced by 2.5 Quebecers,” she said by phone from her farm.

The provincial program pays minimum wage, plus the $100 per week top-up and requires that applicants be available to work at least 25 hours per week. But Marcel Groleau, president of Union des producteurs agricoles, which represents about 42,000 Quebec farmers, says those kind of schedules simply won’t cut it.

“It will take farms — at a minimum — 40 hours per week, per employee, to replace the foreign labour,” he said in a recent interview.

The Canadian border remains open to seasonal farm workers, he explained, but many of them are having difficulty obtaining travel permits in their home countries.

“The pandemic made us realize how much we rely on foreign labour — but it’s been hard to attract local labour in the fields for many years now,” Groleau said.

Florence Lachapelle is hoping she’ll qualify for the extra $100 per week.

She had already agreed to work on Plante’s farm to help replace the Guatemalan farmhands before the province created the recruiting program. The 19-year-old visual arts student from Montreal met Plante and D’Aoust through family.

Lachapelle said she got involved in environmental activism at her junior college but since the pandemic doesn’t know what to do with her energy.

“I think the key to fighting climate change is through agricultural self-sufficiency and knowing how to work the earth in a respectful way,” she said in a recent interview. “I really want to learn how it works.”

And while people such as Lachapelle may be helping to fill a critical gap created by the pandemic, there are other fragile links in the agricultural supply chain exposed by the pandemic.

COVID-19 has highlighted the problems associated with industry concentration, particularly within the food-processing sector, Groleau said.

“There are fewer and fewer (processing plants), and the ones that are left are bigger and bigger,” he said. “When there is an issue at one of them, there are serious impacts for the rest of the supply chain.”

For example, the closure of a single meat packing plant in Alberta last week forced Canada to curtail beef exports to meet domestic demand. The Cargill-operated factory in Alberta has seen an outbreak linked to at least 484 cases of COVID-19s, including one death.

“We are not, at this point, anticipating shortages of beef,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said earlier in the week, “but prices might go up.”

Aside from higher prices, Plante said she and other farmers in her network expect food shortages this fall. She and her husband have already estimated they will have to cut production this year by about a third.

Pascal Theriault, a lecturer at McGill University’s farm management and technology program and vice-president of Quebec’s order of agronomists, said he hopes this crisis forces Canadians to rethink their relationship with food.

“We worked on producing food at the lowest possible cost and that’s all that counted,” he said in a recent interview. But over the years, international supply chains controlled by a handful of big players have contributed to Canadians’ alienation from the food they eat.

“I think the crisis will build awareness to eat more locally,” he said. “It’s not that we weren’t doing it before, but now we are really paying attention to it.”

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Buying local could mean higher grocery bills for Canadian consumers used to seeing stores stocked with imported produce grown with cheaper labour under fewer regulations.

Canadians spend about 10 per cent of their budgets on food — one of the lowest proportions in the world, Theriault said. So there is room to pay a little more for local products — but not that much more, he said.

Lachapelle started her new job Thursday. She’ll live in a trailer on Plante’s farm and keep mostly to herself for two weeks to ensure she is not carrying the virus. Then when she starts what she expects will be gruelling work in the fields, she will respect physical distancing guidelines.

“I am very hard-working,” she said. “I’m 19, and I think I am ready, physically and mentally. I know it’s going to be a challenge. But I think it’ll be will super fun!”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 26, 2020.

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OTTAWA — The federal government is providing rent relief to businesses that can’t afford to pay their landlords at a time when their operations are seriously curtailed or shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The federal help, expected to lower rent by 75 per cent for affected small businesses, will be provided in partnership with the provinces and territories, which have jurisdiction over rents.

The Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance will provide forgivable loans to qualifying commercial property owners to cover 50 per cent of rent payments by eligible small business tenants experiencing financial hardship in April, May and June.

PM promises $9B aid package for students

 

The loans will be forgiven if the mortgaged property owner agrees to reduce the eligible small business tenants’ rent by at least 75 per cent for the three corresponding months under a rent forgiveness agreement, which will include a pledge not to evict the tenant while the agreement is in place.

The small business tenant would cover the remainder, up to 25 per cent of the rent.

Affected small business tenants are those paying less than $50,000 per month in rent and who have temporarily ceased operations, or have experienced at least a 70 per cent drop in pre-COVID-19 revenues. The program is also available to charities and non-profit organizations.

The federal Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. will administer and deliver the program.

Provinces and territories will cover up to 25 per cent of costs, subject to terms of agreements with Ottawa. They will also ensure implementation of the measures.

It is expected the new program will be operational by mid-May, with commercial property owners lowering the rents of their small business tenant’s payable for the months of April and May, retroactively, and for June.

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With the first of the month just around the corner, Finance Minister Bill Morneau appealed to landlords to be flexible until the program is up and running.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised Friday that Ottawa would soon “have more to say” about rent relief for larger businesses.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business applauded many elements of the new program, but had some reservations.

The federation is concerned the program may be overly complicated and too reliant on landlords to administer, the group’s executive vice-president, Laura Jones, said in a statement.

Landlords might not bother with the program if it means absorbing some losses, even if their tenants badly need the help, the federation said. In addition, the threshold of 70 per cent in lost revenue might disqualify hard-hit businesses from getting help.

“This is welcome news but many business owners with dramatic revenue losses will not qualify for the program,” Jones said.

NDP MP Gord Johns, the critic for small businesses, echoed those concerns, and said the announcement falls short of the business-saving measures owners have been hoping for.

“For business owners whose landlords chose to not chip in and sign on, they still face the very real threat of eviction through no fault of their own,” he said.

Morneau said it’s in the best interests of landlords and business tenants to take part, since both are struggling under the public health conditions.

“The landlords also have been going through challenges because in many cases businesses have not been able to pay,” he said. “So we think this provides a very good incentive for both parties.”

PM: Working to help as many businesses as possible

Trudeau said the government is working to help as many businesses as possible, but reminded people of the unprecedented crisis Canada is experiencing.

“Unfortunately this is something we are grappling with,” he said. “We know certain businesses are extremely hard-hit.”

Small businesses also have access to credit to help them through the crisis, he noted.

Financial institutions have provided interest-free credit of up to $40,000 to eligible businesses, and up to $10,000 is forgivable if the loan is repaid by the end of 2022.

Trudeau said it’s not clear yet how the country will move to reopen the economy, so the relief measures the government has put in place will be adjusted as things unfold.

 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 24, 2020.

BERLIN ― Foodora says it is making plans to cease operations in Canada on May 11.

The Berlin-based food delivery app says it has not been able to reach a level of profitability in Canada that’s sustainable enough to continue operations.

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It says the decision was made in part because it was competing against strong rivals and operating in a highly saturated market for online food delivery.

Watch: 6 rookie mistakes to avoid when ordering groceries for the first time online. Story continues below.

 

Foodora says it was unable to get to a position that would allow it to continue to operate without having to continually absorb losses, and so it filed a notice of intention.

Foodora says it provided its Canadian workers with notice of the change today and is working on devising a proposal to provide additional recovery to employees and other creditors.

The business operated in 10 Canadian cities over the last five years and had racked up 3,000 restaurants on the platform.

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MCHENRY, IL — Officers at a local police department showed they don’t take themselves too seriously when they shared a video this past week of a sneaky squirrel that snuck into the vestibule right outside the department’s lobby. The viral video shows two officers hilariously attempting to get the brave squirrel out of the McHenry Police Department. What follows is two officers in uniform dodging the animal, some shrieks and running away by the dispatcher who was shooting the video and “tactical” maneuvers used by the officers to try and coax the animal out.

The McHenry Police Department wrote in a Facebook post shared on New Year’s Day that the video shows how officers were “upping their training game” in 2019.

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“This video is a test of our officer’s ability to handle disorderly subjects who come in to the police department,” according to the Facebook post. “If you can handle a squirrel, you can handle, well, we don’t know, that’s why we’re training!”

The squirrel did eventually make its way out of the police department just fine and was not injured, police said.

“Our officers on the other hand, they are seeking counseling.”

The video has since received over 1,000 comments, many from local residents joining in on the fun, and has been viewed over 736,000 times on the police department’s Facebook page.

“I have many squirrels around my home, if you’d like to set up a training schedule,” one person wrote in the comments section.

Another asked, “Couldn’t it be charged with unlawful entry as well?”

The McHenry Police Department responded: “Currently a warrant out for him. ‘Uncatchable!'”

Others thanked officers for their sense of humor.

“Thank you for making a widow who was having a hard day laugh so hard and giving her a good chuckle,” one woman wrote.

MORE VIA THE MCHENRY POLICE DEPARTMENT FACEBOOK PAGE

Photo via the McHenry Police Department Facebook page

WURTLAND, KY — A Kentucky elementary school teacher shown in a video as she dragged a 9-year-old student with autism down a hallway by his arm is facing criminal charges and has been fired, Greenup County Schools officials said Monday. The incident happened last fall at Wurtland Elementary School, but the video was just released by the child’s mother, Angel Nelson, who says she wants to improve protections for special needs students.

The more than one-minute-long video, which was captured by school security cameras, shows the teacher attempting to get the boy to walk on his own. When he didn’t, she continued to drag him, both on his back and on his knees. The teacher, identified by Nelson as Trina Abrams, is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesay on a charge of fourth-degree assault, a misdemeanor, according to media reports.

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The school district said in a statement Monday that both Kentucky’s Child Protective Services division and its Education Standards Board were made aware of the teacher’s actions, and that she has been fired.

Nelson wrote on Facebook that in addition to autism, her son has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression, and also has speech limitations. As part of his diagnoses, he sometimes experiences “a meltdown,” his mother wrote.

When that happened on Oct 24, 2018, Abrams “grabbed my son by the wrist and bent it backward,” Nelson wrote, adding that tests taken later that day and in subsequent days showed that he had a wrist sprain, swelling and bruising.

Nelson said she may never know what happened before her son was dragged into the hallway because a security camera in the classroom was pointed toward a corner that day — something she doesn’t think should be allowed — and because of her son’s limited ability to communicate what happened.

But, she wrote on Facebook, the “incident was violent enough to not only injure my child, but to also destroy his shoes.”

Nelson said she posted the video on her Facebook page to raise awareness.

“We as parents trust teachers and school staff on a daily basis to help teach and help our children succeed,” she wrote. “We should never have to worry about anything like this ever happening.”

She also thinks teachers should receive more training on how to handle children with disabilities.

“There should also be more laws in place for any child, like my son, who are abused by the adults we entrust to care for them,” she wrote. “The fact that my son is not able to fully verbalize what he went through means that we must fight that much harder for all kids, but especially the kids who cannot speak for themselves.”

Nelson told CNN the teacher humiliated her son in front of his classmates and “made him feel different.”

“Teachers are supposed to stop the bullying,” she told CNN, “not be the bullies.”
As result of the experience, Nelson wrote on Facebook that her son will have to go through “more intense occupational therapy to regain his skills that took so long to grasp,” including fine motor skills like handwriting, buttoning his pants and tying his shoes.

Calep Nelson, the boy’s stepfather, told WSAZ that he and his wife told Abrams about their son’s special needs when they enrolled him in school. He said the teacher reassured them that she had many years of experience dealing with autistic children and they shouldn’t worry.

“This is the same lady that looked us in the eye and said ‘Your son is safe with me,'” Calep Nelson said.

He thinks the teacher should see “the inside of a jail.”

“She didn’t beat him to a bloody pulp, but she did abuse a child,” he said. “Anybody that does that to a child should go to jail.”

Greenup County Schools Superintendent Sherry Horsley tells WSAZ the woman is no longer teaching at the school.

In a statement to television station WSAZ, Horsley said the school district acted appropriately as officials became aware of the situation. The statement said:

“The Greenup County School District prioritizes the safety of our students. The district followed established safety protocol as soon as this situation became known. The parent was contacted immediately and the student was assessed by the school nurse and referred for outside medical evaluation. Child Protective Services was contacted and the Kentucky State Police opened an investigation. The teacher was removed from the school and a formal investigation was conducted. The superintendent also followed protocol and reported the incident to the Kentucky Education Standards Board. The EPSB determines whether or not a teacher keeps their teaching certificate. All GCSD staff are trained to prevent incidents of restraint. Each school has a specially trained team to address immediate issues. In addition, each school has teachers specially trained to address autism related behaviors.”

File photo via Shutterstock

NEW YORK CITY — New York’s state Senate passed the Dream Act, which will provide access to state college tuition aid to undocumented immigrants’ children, on Wednesday. The bill was renamed to honor state Sen. Jose Peralta, who championed the cause before his death from cancer.

“After years of advocacy, DREAMers in New York will finally be able to step out of the shadows and use higher education to live their American Dream,” said Manhattan Assemblywoman Carmen De La Rosa, who sponsored the bill. “This is a historic moment for New York State.”

The Jose Peralta New York Dream Act, which passed with a 40-20 vote, will allow New York children, regardless of immigration status, to qualify for merit-based scholarships and the New York State Tuition Assistance Program if they meet certain criteria.

Applicants must have done one of the following:

The bill is expected to pass easily through the lower chamber, according to Bronx Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.

“The Assembly Majority believes in breaking down barriers, not creating them,” said Heastie. “We have repeatedly passed the DREAM Act because we know it is economically misguided and morally unjust to deprive students educated in our very own public schools of the tools they need to be successful.”

Once passed by the Assembly, the Dream Act will go to Governor Cuomo to sign, which he has pledged to do, according to the New York Times.

Several New York Dreamers came forward to champion the bill and share what it will mean for their futures.

“I was shut out from pursuing a higher education, because I did not have access to state financial aid,” said Karen Garcia, DREAMer and Make the Road New York activist. “All students, regardless of immigration status, will be able to pursue their dreams and go to college.”

“Education is a human right,” added Yohan Garcia. “I am more than glad that today we are working collectively to make sure that this right is granted to all undocumented youth in the State of New York.”

---

Activists rally for the passage of a ‘clean’ Dream Act, one without additional security or enforcement measures, outside the New York office of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), January 10, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

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Les amoureuses du blush et du fond teint réfléchiront désormais à deux fois avant de passer vingt minutes à se transformer. Car une étude très sérieuse, du “Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology“, conclut que les femmes se révèlent être plus attirantes lorsqu’elles sont maquillés avec parcimonie.

Le maquillage léger attire plus facilement les hommes

Du fond de teint, un peu de mono-bulle sur les yeux, du mascara, du blush, du rouge à lèvres… L’attirail pour se pomponner est particulièrement large pour celles qui ne peuvent pas sortir sans maquillage. Et pourtant, si on en croit une étude récente, les adeptes du pinceau se donneraient trop de mal pour peu de résultat.L’étude est simple : il s’agit de présenter des photos de femmes plus ou moins maquillées à un échantillon d’hommes et de femmes. Et, à la surprise générale, une majorité écrasante a trouvé plus attirantes les “cobayes“ qui présentaient 30 % à 40 % de maquillage en moins, par rapport aux clichés présentant des visages un peu plus pomponnés. Et il y a consensus puisque ce pourcentage vaut aussi bien pour les femmes que pour les hommes.
D’après le médecin qui a mené l’expérience, on croit à tort à certains clichés : le maquillage rend plus attirant, les hommes préférèrent les femmes minces et, ces dernières, les hommes musclés.
Une bonne nouvelle pour les fans du blush qui gagneront désormais du temps et de l’argent.Source : Relaxnews

Le dépistage organisé du cancer du col de l’utérus, tel qu’expérimenté dans 13départements en France depuis 2010, augmente de manière significative la couverture de dépistage des femmes peu ou pas dépistées, issues le plus souvent de milieux défavorisées, et contribue en ce sens à la lutte contre les inégalités sociales de santé, selon une étude publiée dans le Bulletin Epidémiologique Hebdomadaire(BEH).

Le dépistage organisé du cancer du col de l'utérus cible les femmes qui échappent au frottis.

Le

cancer invasif du col de l’utérus était en 2012 le 11^ème cancer féminin en termes de fréquence et le 12^ème en termes de mortalité. Son dépistage repose sur le

frottis cervico-utérin, qui est recommandé à toutes les femmes âgées de 25 à 65 ans, tous les 3 ans après deux frottis négatifs réalisés à un an d’intervalle. Seules les femmes ayant subi une hystérectomie totale ou n’ayant jamais eu de rapport sexuel sont exclues de ces recommandations.

Alors que plusieurs initiatives ont été prises par certains départements depuis les années 1990, une expérimentation formelle a été mise en place en 2010 dans 13 départements français, selon un cahier des charges commun. Les résultats définitifs de cette expérimentation devraient être présentés fin 2014, mais l’Institut de veille sanitaire a décidé de publier dans son BEH les résultats de son évaluation réalisée fin 2013.Le programme de dépistage organisé du col de l’utérus, contrairement aux autres programmes de dépistage organisé de cancers (sein ou côlon), repose sur l’incitation et la relance des femmes qui ne se font pas dépister spontanément. La couverture de dépistage individuel du cancer du col utérin relativement élevée, avec une forte proportion de femmes réalisant des frottis en libéral (56,6 % entre 2006-2008), explique ce choix de ne cibler que les femmes peu ou pas dépistées.Le dépistage organisé du cancer du col a permis à plus de 270 000 femmes de bénéficier d’un frottisAu total, sur les 2,37 millions de femmes de 25-65 ans représentant la population-cible dans les 13 départements, plus de 1,33 millions de femmes ont été incitées à se faire dépister sur la période 2010-2012. Sur l’ensemble des dépistages réalisés, qui comprennent aussi bien ceux qui l’ont été dans le cadre d’une démarche individuelle ou suite à une incitation/relance, la part de ces derniers s’élève à 13,2 points sur une couverture de dépistage de 58,7 %, mais peut varier de 9 (Val-de-Marne) à 24 points (Cher), indiquent les auteurs de l’étude.Mais au final, les taux de dépistage (individuel et organisé) restent en-deçà des objectifs de couverture inscrits dans la loi de santé publique de 2004, qui sont de

80 %, soulignent-ils. Seuls les départements métropolitains qui bénéficient de financements pérennes (Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin et Isère) tirent leur épingle du jeu avec des taux de couverture supérieurs à 70 %.Les auteurs ont également calculé le taux de participation par vague d’incitation et de relance, afin d’apprécier l’efficacité de ces démarches. Il s’élevait à 16,4 % dans les 12 mois suivant l’incitation, mais pouvait là aussi varier de 9,7 % dans le Val-de-Marne à 23,6 % en Isère. “Globalement, grâce à ce programme, sur trois années d’activité, ce sont au moins 255 982 femmes supplémentaires, et même 276 341 en comptabilisant les femmes ayant réalisé un frottis en 2013 mais incitées/relancées en 2010-2012, qui ont pu bénéficier d’un dépistage“, précisent-ils.Des frottis anormaux dans près de 4 % des casSur l’ensemble des frottis reçus et analysés, 3,9 % ont été jugés anormaux, conduisant 35 000 femmes environ à réaliser des examens complémentaires à la recherche d’éventuelles lésions histologiques (précancéreuses ou cancéreuses).La mise en place d’un programme national de dépistage organisé du cancer du col de l’utérus fait partie des actions inscrites dans le Plan cancer 2014-2019.La France suivrait ainsi la tendance observée dans la pays d’Europe par l’InVS, qui est celle d’une “généralisation du dépistage organisé du cancer du col de l’utérus“, mais selon des “modalités de dépistage très hétérogènes“.

Les principaux

facteurs de risque du cancer du col de l’utérus – L’infection par certains papillomavirus (facteur le plus important) : cette infection peut provoquer des anomalies cellulaires (dysplasies) qui peuvent dégénérer en cancer du col ;
– La multiparité : plusieurs accouchements entraînent des petites lésions du col et donc des remaniements cellulaires ;
– Le nombre élevé de partenaires sexuels ;
– La précocité des premières relations sexuelles ou de la première grossesse ;
– Le tabagisme ;
– Une contraception pendant au moins 5 ans (facteur de moindre influence).

Amélie PelletierSource : Duport N, Salines E, Grémy I.

Premiers résultats de l’évaluation du programme expérimental de dépistage organisé du cancer du col de l’utérus, France, 2010-2012. Bull Epidémiol Hebd. 2014;(13-14-15):228-34.Click Here: cheap nrl jerseys