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Ontario failed to toughen rules on lead in water despite advice, documents show
For at least four years, Ontario officials have known that the provincial safety limit for lead in drinking water doesn’t go far enough to protect the public, newly released documents show. But despite internal proposals about taking action, and dialogue with municipalities regarding changes, no new lead quality standard has been introduced. Officials at the… Read more
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Ontario opioid deaths nine times higher among First Nations people amid questions over treatment
The treatment meant to save Niibin Pahpeguish’s life began to feel like a prison. After almost a decade battling an addiction that began with prescribed painkillers and later escalated to street opioids, she entered a treatment program in 2009. There, at a facility in Brantford, Ont., she was put on methadone, a drug prescribed to… Read more
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Health officials call for action following ‘Bad Practice’ journalism collaboration
There have been calls for a systemic overhaul of monitoring systems following an international investigation by 48 media partners in 46 countries — including Canada’s Investigative Journalism Bureau. The collaboration, led by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the Times of London and Norway’s VG, detailed how physicians in Europe and North America have sometimes skirted sanctions, avoided… Read more
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Bad Practice: How doctors jump borders to leave troubling pasts behind
In 2018, family physician Ken Shafquat Intikhab Abrahim was reprimanded by Florida’s medical board and banned from prescribing certain pain medications after being accused by officials of providing “potentially lethal” amounts of addictive drugs to patients. Four months later, he was reprimanded by North Carolina’s medical board for “willfully concealing” the Florida matter from them. … Read more
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INSIGHTS: Our way of thinking about informed consent has evolved over the last century. In a world of human guinea pigs, does it need to evolve further?
By Jonathan Moreno Jonathan Moreno retired as a Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, of History and Sociology of Science, and of Philosophy, at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a prolific author and writer. The IJB report on so-called “professional guinea pigs,” people who loan their bodies to clinical research organizations (CROs) in… Read more
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Numerous dogs ‘humanely sacrificed’ as test subjects at private lab in Toronto area
The vast majority of Canada’s leading university research labs have stopped using dogs as test subjects in scientific research — a practice that Ontario Premier Doug Ford has promised to ban with forthcoming legislation. But pharmaceutical testing on dogs continues in lesser-known, often private research firms, including a large Scarborough research facility where the animals… Read more
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Myrialine Catule begins tenure as the fourth Canadian Journalism Foundation/Investigative Journalism Bureau Black Journalism Fellow
Myrialine Catule, recipient of the 2025 CJF-IJB Black Investigative Journalism Fellowship, will spend the next six months working on public-interest investigations with the IJB. “As an emerging journalist, I am proud to take my first step in the investigative field with the Investigative Journalism Bureau,” says Catule, a native Montrealer and recent graduate of Concordia… Read more
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Behind the Reporting: Jenna Olsen on exposing an Ontario hospital’s dog testing secrets
Walking through the sterile hallways of St. Joseph’s Hospital in London, Ont., you would never think you are sharing the space with dogs. This is an environment where you expect heart attacks to be cured, not caused. What we discovered in our investigation into the use of dogs in cardiac arrest studies at the hospital… Read more
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INSIGHTS: Animal research is a failed research paradigm and not morally permissible
Ari Joffe, MD, FRCPC is a clinical professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Pediatric Critical Care at the University of Alberta, and a clinical professor (secondary) at the John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre at the University of Alberta. He is also an attending physician in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, with a special interest… Read more
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‘Be ready in the morning’: Inside the sprawling online industry selling human smuggling services
A silver Toyota minivan pulls into a bank parking lot in Toronto’s west end. Two young Punjabi men step out and start looking around for their client, a woman they’ve been communicating with over the previous days through texts and calls. She has agreed to pay them $4,000 to be smuggled south across the border… Read more
