By Cecilia Nasmith
With the focus on COVID-19 easing somewhat at the Haliburton Kawartha Pine Ridge District Health Unit, Health Protection Division Manager Richard Orcharovich said at the March board meeting, look for Environmental Health services to ramp up.
Over the past two years, much of their work has been COVID-related – assisting with vaccine deliveries, reporting on vaccination clinics, delivering isolation orders.
“The biggest chunk of our work was assisting the business community understanding regulatory requirements,” Orcharovich said. With regulations changing frequently, they worked closely with chambers of commerce and business-improvement associations (as well as municipalities) to help them make sense of the most current guidelines and mandates in place.
They also responded to hundreds of complaints.
“As you can imagine, whenever there was a change, there was a lot of fear in the community and people were calling us to complain about individuals and businesses not being in compliance,” he said.
Meanwhile, they carried on other Environmental Health services in the background, always having on-call response available after-hours and on weekends. And inspections continued for those businesses permitted to operate, investigations were conducted into health hazards and animal bites, and surveillance work continued on mosquitoes, ticks and recreational water sampling.
Orcharovich said they made 638 inspections of food businesses and 34 special events (such as farmers' markets and agricultural events).
Rabies services were kept busy, with a new Keep Bites At Bay program developed for schools (and presented at 11 of them so far). And they investigated 604 animal bites.
“This is huge!” he stated.
“Our animal bites have gone through the roof for the last five years.”
Forty-seven people required treatment for animal bites (five of them at Campbellford Memorial Hospital and 13 at Northumberland Hills Hospital), and 20 animals were submitted for testing – cats, dogs, bats, raccoons, plus one horse and one wolf, all testing negative.
Northumberland County won the dubious distinction of being identified as an endemic area for ticks. Their tick dragging surveillance took place at 14 sites in the spring and fall, five of them in Northumberland. They found 34 thickets, and the only eight that tested positive for the bacteria that causes Lyme Disease were in Northumberland.
Mosquito trappings at 15 locations (five of them in Northumberland) to test for West Nile Virus and Eastern Equine Encephalitis yielded no positive results from the 18,444 mosquitoes collected.
“That does not mean we don't have it – it just means we didn't find it,” Orcharovich warned.
“Enforcement activities in 2021 were a lot higher than we have ever had in our department,” he continued.
They created a multi-agency committee to ensure consistency in enforcing the Reopening Ontario Act, with partner agencies including the OPP and municipal police forces and bylaw officers. The results were 11 tickets, 10 summonses, four orders to comply or close, and two tickets to private citizens for failure to isolate.
Non-COVID enforcement saw two tickets to pet owners for not vaccinating their pets (“after about four months of trying to negotiate with them”) and, for various infractions, three tickets to foot premises and two summonses to tourism operations.
Looking ahead, this department hopes to reinstitute the low-cost rabies clinics that have not run over the past two years, to work on heating and warming shelters, to resume inspections of the personal-services settings that were closed during a large part of the pandemic, and to conduct more assessment and inspection of the special events that are coming back to HKPR communities.
