Invasive Strep A is spiking

Colds seem menacing these days. If one of my kids comes down with a runny nose or sore throat, I worry. Is it COVID? Will we have to cancel everything on our schedules? How sick will we all get? Or is it a deadly form of strep throat? Aggressive, sometimes life-threatening strep infections have spiked globally.

Here in Canada, 327 cases of invasive Strep A were reported between August 2022 and February 11, 2023—nearly 100 more than average. Some cases can fly under the radar until it’s too late: since October, more than eight per cent of cases involving children and youth in Ontario have been fatal. That’s a terrifyingly high number.

John McCormick, a molecular microbiologist at the Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario, studies such infections. In this Maclean’s Q&A, he explains what’s behind the surge, whether Canadians should be worried about the rise in cases and how we can protect ourselves against infection.

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

For the past six years, Canadian photojournalist Ian MacEachern has been shooting iconoclastic street scenes. This year, a collection of his photos are featured in the exhibit Black and White Is Like Radio, which runs until April 16 at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton. His pieces, taken in Canada and beyond, are the product of a life behind the lens, and evoke social ironies—or, as he calls them, “wild moments in nature.”

In Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak’s family, artists run wild on both sides. Their childhood homes in Yellowknife, and later Edmonton, were filled with relatives’ creations, including a painting of wild geese—a wedding present to their parents from Kablusiak’s uncle, Bill Nasogaluak, a famed Inuvialuk artist. With genes like that, it was practically a given that Kablusiak—who jokes that they only use their English name, Jade, at Starbucks—would eventually pursue an arts diploma and degree. Now, they’re garnering buzz for their mould-breaking mash-ups of Inuit art history and Western pop culture, zeroing in on the painful displacement of, they say, “being from the North, but existing down south.”

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Marcel LeBrun made millions as a software tycoon, then funnelled his fortune into 12 Neighbours, a planned community of 99 affordable tiny homes in Fredericton. In this feature from the March 2024 print issue, Maclean’s writer Sarah Treleaven writes, “LeBrun’s gargantuan act of altruism, channelled so efficiently into diminutive 240-square-foot homes, has raised questions about what the country’s policy-makers might learn about how to rectify its housing woes from one man with deep pockets—one who stepped in where the government has failed.”

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