It’s Wednesday! Which means Postcall’s surging into your morning like shoppers into Walmart this week! 🛍️🛒

Not throwing shade here —Black Fridays have always been wilder on the less-polite side of the border. 😬🇺🇸 In particular — at Walmarts, where the majority of incidents have occurred. The aptly-named-website Black Friday Death Count records casualties, injuries… and a few straight-up murders. 😵 Luckily, thanks to the recently increase of months-long sales and online shopping, those numbers aren’t in danger of rising. Why anyone would prefer to shop in-store rather than in their PJs is beyond us. 🏡🤷‍♀️

Now on to this week’s stories!

• Vaping 2.0💨: Pouching the Limits of Nicotine 🚬

• CRISPR 🧬 approved in UK

• Slow-wave sleep loss linked to dementia 🧠

• 🫀PCI (finally) shows benefit in stable angina

• WTF MTHFR 💊

• Doctors Without (Provincial) Borders 🧑🏽‍⚕️🇨🇦

• The AI world loses its mind for a weekend

• Postcall Classics: Bites, picks, crossword 🧩

Driving these numbers:

Finally, some good news. Inflation in both Canada and the US fell (3.2% down south and 3.1% up north) in October. That’s good progress towards that mythical soft landing (stopping inflation without triggering a recession). As a result, the TSX, S&P, and Nasdaq all ending the week up about 2.5%.

Vaping 2.0💨: Pouching the Limits of Nicotine 🚬

Remember three years back when Health Canada issued a public warning against nicotine pouches? 🤔

What happened: This October 12th, Health Canada gave the thumbs-up to Imperial Tobacco's Zonnic, the first nicotine pouch in Canada. These pouches — made with nicotine, water, flavourings, sweeteners, and plant-based fibres — are gaining global popularity as a potential "lower-risk product" compared to traditional tobacco. What sets them apart from other smokeless options is the absence of tobacco leaf.

Why it’s interesting: Packed with 4mg of nicotine, these pouches dodge prescription regulations under Canada's Natural Health Products category, making them fair game to sell to kids for the first time in over a century. Imperial Tobacco can flaunt them on TV, billboards, social media, and even dish out free samples. Health organizations are pushing Health Ministers to either slap a prescription label on nicotine pouches or pause sales until rules catch up✋.

Still, many stores voluntarily keep Zonnic under wraps, checking IDs before selling. Imperial Tobacco insists their social media ads are strictly for the 25-and-up crew — though flashy packaging and flavours like cotton candy, unicorn milk 🦄, and dragon’s blood suggest otherwise. 

Health Canada's latest survey on Canadian students, covering 61,096 teens in grades 7 to 12, found:

• 29% had tried an e-cigarette.

• 63% preferred fruity flavours.

• Canadian teens are high on the world chart for regularly using e-cigarettes. (Note: This survey data predates the surge in disposable vapes from last year.)

Bottom line: Nicotine pouches might seem less harmful than burning tobacco, but the lack of research makes safety confirmation tough. Cynthia Callard, executive director of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, leaves it blunt: “We know very little actually, about the health effects of these products… in the same way we didn't know about cigarettes 100 years ago.”

Things your attending might pimp you on 🙋🏽‍♀️👨‍⚕️ 

1. 🧬 CRISPR approved in UK

Casgevy, a CRISPR–Cas9 therapy, has been approved in the UK for sickle-cell disease and β-thalassaemia. This treatment involves extracting stem cells from patients, editing the BCL11A gene (which normally inhibits fetal Hgb production) using CRISPR–Cas9, and then reintroducing these modified cells into the patient. The science may be cool, but the treatment is estimated to cost at least $2 mil per patient — yikes! 

2. Slow-wave sleep loss linked to dementia 🧠

A study from JAMA revealed that the percentage of slow-wave sleep decreases with age and is influenced by genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's disease. Greater reductions in slow-wave sleep were associated with an increased risk of developing dementia. Add it to the list of reasons why call is detrimental to health, thx. 

3. 🫀PCI (finally) shows benefit in stable angina

The ORBITA-2 trial from the NEJM has dropped: percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) has been shown to effectively reduce angina frequency, enhance exercise capacity, and improve quality of life. The benefits of PCI in stable angina were immediate, sustained over 12 weeks, and consistent across various end-points. 

4. WTF MTHFR 💊

Maybe you’ve come across the MTHFR on TikTok; maybe you’re going, WTF? Mutations in this gene can result in decreased methylation efficiency, which some influencers claim is the reason you’re depressed, anxious, have ADHD, still live in your parents’ basement, etc. In reality, a large chunk of the population has this mutation and is just fine, so please don’t go spending your LOC on pre-methylated Vit B and glutathione (at least, not with these interest rates!). 

Doctors Without (Provincial) Borders🧑🏽‍⚕️🇨🇦

Last month, health ministers greenlit🚦a new licensing program, making it easier for Canadian doctors and nurses to work in different provinces… and premiers aren’t happy about it. 

At a Council of the Federation meeting Nov. 5-6 — where Canada’s premiers discussed much-needed action on issues like housing, infrastructure, and health services — Premier Tim Houston called for a stop on healthcare worker poaching. The other premiers agreed: recruiting workers from other provinces hinders team efforts.

What Happened: Back in October, Canada’s health ministers gathered in PEI to address pressing issues in Canada's healthcare system. Led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's $196 billion proposal, discussions focused on a severe shortage of healthcare professionals. The result? A five-point plan, which included objectives:

• To facilitate mobility for healthcare professionals across provinces.

• To streamline certification for international workers, aiming to address the pressing healthcare workforce shortages.

• To focus on nursing retention. 

To the premiers, the five-point plan might as well have been the five-point palm exploding heart technique 🥷, because although they agreed that job fairs targeting university grads are okay, specific attempts to entice already-employed healthcare workers are… not. 

Why It’s Interesting: The new licensing system addresses the healthcare staffing shortage, especially in underserved areas. In addition to the "nursing retention toolkit," provinces like BC are trying to hold on to their precious healthcare workers with attractive offers and reforms. BC was the first province to agree to Ottawa’s bilateral funding agreement. Now all the provinces are on board, except Quebec, which staunchly believes “that health is a matter of provincial jurisdiction.”

Postcall’s Take: Big changes are afoot. ⛰️ Concerns, too — about the quality of care with fast-tracked certifications, tensions between national and provincial needs, etc. Whether the premiers’ agreement signifies a united front is a matter of perspective. For example, it’s great that the SK premier wants to back away from pilfering healthcare workers from other provinces — especially after their battle with NL a couple months ago. Meanwhile, different tactics to handle nurses’ burn-outs and quitting are varying by province and hospital. Maybe province-jumping means not addressing working conditions at home? 🤔

🍔 Quick Bites

1: 🏡 In a move aimed at Canada’s housing crisis, property owners may not be able to claim their rental expenses against their income in the near future. Ottawa wants to make Airbnb rentals less lucrative to increase the number of long-term rentals. Airbnb points out that the reason so many property owners offer short-term rentals is to mitigate the rising cost of living.

2: 🇮🇱 Now in the 6th week of the Israel-Hamas war, a deal has been brokered that will bring a pause to the fighting. It includes a temporary ceasefire to allow the release of 50 people held by Hamas (out of the 240 hostages captured from Israel), 150 people held by Israel, and delivery of emergency aid to Gaza civilians. After the 4 day pause, Israeli PM vows to continue fighting Hamas.

3: 👾 It’s been drama in the AI world this weekend. The board of OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT) surprise-fired its celebrated CEO Sam Altman on Friday - their reason: he was “not consistently candid” and could no longer be trusted (read: they disagreed on the speed of innovation of AI). But quickly, the board had egg on its face, when 700 of the 770 OpenAI employees signed a letter calling for Sam’s reinstatement.

Guess the pressure was too much, because late last night Sam pulled out the Reverse Uno:

4: 🛍️ It’s Black Friday this week, if you somehow managed to avoid seeing all the ads, everywhere. We’ve done a rigorous meta analysis, and National Post likely has the most comprehensive list. Of course, no need to buy it if you didn’t need it in the first place 😉.

🕹️ Game ⛳️

We know, we know… You look forward to this every week. (Us, too!)

First question: What is the term for “difficulty breathing when lying down”?

Last week’s fastest times: 1:54 and 2:02!

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