Month: January 2021

Disturbing video footage shows a man crawling out of a hospital in Canada after doctors assumed he was “faking” his intense leg pain. David Pontone, 45, is seen on all fours dragging himself out of Toronto’s Humber River Hospital following his premature discharge — because staffers dismissed his problem as being psychological, according to CBC News. “They thought I was faking it because I was bipolar,” Pontone told CBC of the April 2018 incident. The surveillance footage has only just been released after the news broadcaster obtained it. “There are no words to describe what I went through that night.” While checking into the hospital, Pontone — who was later diagnosed with a rare nerve disorder — told staffers that he takes medication for bipolar dis...

Updated at 5 p.m.: All the appointments were gone within an hour, according to the county website Syracuse, N.Y. -- In less than an hour, people snapped up 990 hard-to-come-by appointments for a first dose of the coronavirus vaccine made available today by Onondaga County. The shots will be given Thursday at the Oncenter in downtown Syracuse. County Executive Ryan McMahon tweeted at about 4 p.m. that the appointments were available. Before 5 p.m., they were all gone. The county received 900 vials of Moderna vaccine today, just one-quarter of what it had received in previous weeks. From the 900 vials, the county can deliver 990 doses of vaccine, McMahon said. Appointments go fast, given the scarcity of vaccine supplies this week in Central New York. McMahon tweeted that the slots were a...

A zoned-out cat lying next to some silver vine leaves. Image: Masao Miyazaki & Reiko Uenoyama When exposed to catnip or silver vine, cats engage in some fairly predictable behaviors, such as licking and chewing the leaves, rubbing their heads and faces against the plants, and rolling on the ground. Cats get a real kick out of these plants, but surprising new research points to a more practical purpose than just wanting to get high. Nepetalactol—the most potent active ingredient in catnip (Nepeta cataria) and silver vine (Actinidia polygama)—provides cats with a chemical defense against mosquitoes, according to new research published in Science Advances. The discovery could explain why felines, whether domesticated cats or hulking jungle predators, display similar behaviors afte...

Photo: Dan Mullan (Getty Images) Drug overdose deaths caused by methamphetamine use in the U.S. have increased sharply over the past decade, according to a new government report released Wednesday. Since 2011, the report found, annual rates of methamphetamine overdose deaths have risen across every demographic group in America and are especially high among American Indians and Alaska Natives. The findings highlight that opioids are not the only drug driving a record spike in overdose deaths in recent years. The report was the work of scientists from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and is based on mortality data collected by the federal government. Opioids such as fentanyl and heroin continue to account for the majority of overdose deaths annually, with deaths rising near...