Time frame: 2020-2022

Overview:
Not long after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Dr Natalie Prystajecky and Dr Melissa Glier, who had already been studying viruses in wastewater since 2018, were able to quickly leverage an existing collaboration, methods, and equipment for testing enteric viruses in wastewater to be able to test for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Recently adopting an alternative sampling method that allows to test wastewater from an entire community, their team is also working on a method to test wastewater as it exits a building, thus providing key information on how COVID-19 is being spread throughout and among BC communities.

Results:
Funding for their work allowed Drs Prystajecky and Glier’s team to optimize their methods and test for SARS-CoV-2 in five wastewater treatment plants in Metro Vancouver, covering nearly 50% of BC’s population, along two regional health authorities. Weekly reports are shared with medical health officers and epidemiologists within regional health authorities, BC Centre for Disease Control staff, and Metro Vancouver.

Their collaborations have extended to the development of a three-day rapid sequencing method to effectively track COVID-19 variants of concern within a region, and key findings from their studies have been published in the Journal of Environmental Sciences and the American Society for Microbiology, with more to come. With the Omicron variant, wastewater testing has become a critical and necessary component of SARS-CoV-2 monitoring and surveillance.

Rapid SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Research Initiative in BC

Time frame: 2021-2022

Overview:
In a new and unique partnership with Genome BC and Michael Smith Health Research BC (formerly the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research), we funded nine new rapid-response vaccine research projects addressing COVID-19 vaccine research priorities and knowledge gaps. This funding program was developed and implemented in real-time, enabling us to get funding to critical research projects rapidly in order to have high-impact on vaccination roll-out for BC. Collective funding of around $1.3M is allowing for vaccine research that ultimately focuses on public health response and ensuring access to, and confidence in, vaccination programs for everyone in BC.

More specifically, the projects funded address areas such as:

• vaccine breakthrough infections;
• vaccine effectiveness in the context of Variants of Concern and in immune response;
• viral transmission;
• equitable distribution;
• vaccine acceptance and attitudes towards vaccines; and
• vaccine literacy and hesitancy among people who are pregnant or breastfeeding, people who are incarcerated, people who work in long-term care homes and a variety of multicultural communities in the Lower Mainland.

For a summary of the projects, go here.

Results:
We’ll continue to share outcomes of this research as these projects progress. You can stay connected on project updates by visiting this page and subscribing to our newsletter.

The post COVID-19 Response: From Monitoring to Vaccination appeared first on Pacific Public Health Foundation.

The post Newsletter #13: June 2020 appeared first on Pacific Public Health Foundation.

Our experts from the BC Centre for Disease Control, VGH, UBC, and BC Cancer, supported by British Columbians, will prevent future outbreaks and save the lives of our most vulnerable. The breakthroughs that they achieve will benefit British Columbians first, with rapid sharing around the world. Our province will make this possible. You can make this possible.

Now is the time for collaboration. By coming together, we will beat this faster, and protect all of our loved ones.

The research that our partners at the BC Centre for Disease Control will be leading will prevent the spread of COVID-19 and keep our population safe. Click below to find out how your gift will help BCCDC experts prevent the spread of the virus. 

The post BC COVID-19 Combat Collective appeared first on Pacific Public Health Foundation.

Phase 1: BC COVID-19 Population Health Survey

The BC COVID-19 SPEAK survey is open to all British Columbians who are 18 and older, and is a tool to help public health experts understand public risk perceptions, personal behaviours and circumstances, acceptability of public health measures, and broader impacts of COVID-19—including social, economic, physical health, mental wellness, and resiliency of communities.

This coordinated effort, led by the BCCDC, engages with the Ministry of Health and each of the health authorities to ensure that British Columbians from all corners of the province, and from all backgrounds, are included and represented. The results of this survey will help us better understand COVID-19, and inform public health strategies to keep us safe and healthy.

Phase 2: BC COVID-19 Serological Survey

Until a vaccine is developed and deployed, herd immunity is our population’s protection against COVID-19. Through serological (blood) sampling, our public health experts will be able to determine susceptibility and immunity within the general population, telling us how close or far we are from herd immunity. We’ll be able to assess and better understand transmission, and determine how much of our population is vulnerable, or immune from the virus.

Experts will also be able to assess the risk of spread among subgroups, including those who are particularly vulnerable or high-risk, as well as those who may be better protected, such as children.

Phase 3: BC COVID-19 Sentinel Surveillance

This is the work that will keep our population safe from future waves of COVID-19 and help us prepare for future pandemics. This type of surveillance will act as an early warning system for any increases in community transmission. To be launched in the fall, this will be particularly important as flu season begins—being able to rapidly identify, contain, and suppress cases of COVID-19 will protect us at a point in time when there is an increase in other respiratory illnesses (like the flu).

This type of surveillance is critical to alerting public health professionals, and allowing them to engage in rapid response wrap-around public health services keeping you, your family, and your community safe.

These are the strategies and approaches that we need to keep all of us safe and healthy for the long run. Public health’s value is three-fold: preventing illness and injury before it happens, understanding diseases and the human impact, and finding solutions that work not only for individuals, but on a population-level. This three-phased collaborative approach is what BC needs now, as we continue to be all in together, and until we can take back normal.

The post Combating COVID-19 on a population level appeared first on Pacific Public Health Foundation.

What your donations are funding

As our provincial leader for outbreak response, population health, prevention, and so much more, the BCCDC exists to keep our population safe and healthy year-round. When a public health emergency like COVID-19 arises, BCCDC’s public health experts—epidemiologists, medical doctors, virologists and microbiologists, lab and data technicians, and many others—take action immediately to protect the population.

Your donations are helping to fund critically important, rapid-response research that will help keep us safe. This funding will allow experts to assess BC’s COVID-19 pandemic response at a population level, by specifically investigating the efficacy and acceptability of current public health measures and directives, assessing the true extent of infections, immunity, and the susceptibility of BC’s population to COVID-19, and importantly planning for future waves and outbreaks to ensure the best systems are in place in advance.

In essence, the questions that this work will start to ask are:

• What are the risk perceptions, acceptability of measures, and broader impacts for the public?
• What does the susceptibility and immunity to COVID-19 look like in BC?
• Which evidence-based strategies are needed for enhanced surveillance?
• What evidence and strategy do we need now to prepare for future waves, so we can act swiftly in the future?
• How do we best inform ongoing public health and prevention measures?

This comprehensive approach will not only help us understand COVID-19 in BC right now, it will help to create evidence-driven plans to prepare and strengthen our public health response that will serve us now and in the future. It will help protect more British Columbians faster, and for longer.

The donations you’ve provided will get this work started. But we know that we still need to build on and generate new evidence around COVID-19 and how to protect more British Columbians. We’ve increased our target to $500,000 to support the BCCDC’s ongoing work. If you haven’t yet already, we ask you to join the hundreds of others and donate to make this work possible today:

As the work develops, we’ll continue to share updates on the progress and needs of our public health experts. This is just the beginning, and we’re just getting started. We hope you’ll continue to follow this journey and support this work.

“We’re so grateful for the outstanding support of British Columbians, coming together to protect our community and support our public health experts at the BCCDC.”

– Cathy Daminato, Chair of BCCDC Foundation

Thank you on behalf of the Foundation and the BCCDC for your collective generosity and support. The amazing messages of thanks, well wishes, and kindness have been so moving to our team. Those messages, in a time when everything is uncertain and anxieties are high, are what keep us going. Thank you for that and for protecting our population.

Diverse partners

We’ve seen incredible support from businesses, unions, other foundations, and individuals. From independent makers of scrunchies and apparel, to tech companies supporting remote work like Teradici, to media giants like Postmedia, and so many more, the support from our private sector partners has been absolutely overwhelming. If you would like to discuss how your company can get involved and help lead the response to COVID-19 in BC, please contact us at donate@bccdcfoundation.org or (604) 707-2635.

Other ways to donate

Online through our website
Over the phone, contact us at (604) 707-2635

The post Rapid Response to COVID-19: Your donations at work appeared first on Pacific Public Health Foundation.

When I was a teenager, I did my best to hide the fact that I was gay. I had a girlfriend and a buzzcut and avoided talking about topics that would raise the subject of sexuality. I was fortunate to have not attended ‘conversion therapy’, but looking back on it now, I’m not sure I would’ve passed up the opportunity had it been presented to me as an option.

‘Conversion therapy’ is a misnomer applied to practices that start from the premise that any sexual orientation other than heterosexual and any gender identity other than cisgender should be denied and suppressed, rather than affirmed and supported. These practices include things like pseudoscientific forms of psychotherapy, aversion or shock therapy, religious teachings, behavioral coaching, and delaying access to gender-affirming care.

And yes, they are still happening, in Canada, today.

My own experiences of societal norms, attitudes and sexuality have always driven my public health research. My doctoral research was on estimating rates of suicide among gay and bisexual men–and understanding why these rates are so high. In the spring of 2019, I was invited to make a statement before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health, in support of their historic study on The Health of LGBTQIA2 Communities in Canada. When I asked the Committee policy analysts what they wanted to know, they said they understood that rates of suicide were unacceptably high in queer and trans communities, but they want to know what the federal government can do about it.

The federal government had just reviewed a petition from MP Sheri Benson to ban conversion therapy for minors in Canada. The petition had 18,200 signatures from across the country, signalling a strong desire among Canadians to end these practices. (in fact, a national poll conducted this year found that 58% of Canadians support a ban on conversion therapy.) The government responded by acknowledging that conversion therapy does not reflect the values of Canadians, or those of the federal government; however the petition was rejected on the basis that “this issue primarily implicates the regulation of the health profession, which is a provincial and territorial responsibility.” I responded by challenging the assumptions of the federal government’s rejection, specifically that the denouncement of conversion therapy by more than 49 health organizations has to-date not brought an end to conversion therapy. Therefore, more action is needed, at all levels of government.

MPs at the Committee hearing had no shortage of questions for me about what a federal ban on conversion therapy should look like. Ron McKinnon (Coquitlam-Port Coquitlam) asked, “first, I’d like to understand who is performing conversion therapy?…are these people doing this for hire or for profit?” He also wanted to know–acknowledging my statement that some people are taken to conversion therapy against their will–“who gets compelled [to attend conversion therapy], and how are they compelled?”

Don Davies (Vancouver Kingsway) asked, “in your view, does this answer [the federal government’s response to Benson’s petition] satisfy you, or would you like to see an explicit Criminal Code provision to ban conversion therapy?” Robert-Falcon Ouellette (Winnipeg Centre) wondered, “how many kids go out of the country [for conversion therapy]?”

My answers to these questions are limited by the scarcity of research on the topic in Canada. Therefore, I have spent much of the past year talking with conversion therapy survivors. In November, I convened a group of 31 survivors, community leaders, researchers, healthcare providers, religious leaders, and policy analysts to set the stage for research to better describe the prevalence and nature of conversion therapy (also known as SOGIECE, sexual orientation and gender identity and expression change efforts) in Canada, as well as the health and social service needs of survivors. In January 2020, we will begin in-depth interviews with survivors from across the country. Leaders of at least two of the federal parties have made election commitments to banning the practices. The policy-action iron is hot, and we are moving quickly to ensure that policy-makers have the data they need to enact effective policies.

Talking with survivors has helped me appreciate the scope and severity of ongoing conversion therapy practices in Canada. What could have been a reality for me–growing up in fear of society’s attitude toward my own sexual orientation–remains a threat for tens of thousands of Canadians. I hid my sexuality throughout my teenage years, and thereby averted opportunities for conversion therapy to be presented to me. Today, LGBTQ2 people are coming out at younger ages. While this is undoubtedly a sign of social progress, it also means that youth may be more vulnerable to conversion therapy because they are more visible than the LGBTQ2 youth of my generation were.

Conversion therapy practices are inhumane. They lead to years of psychological distress, and inhibit our ability to lead self-affirmed and self-actualized lives. In some cases, survivors have told me that they lost their ability to work and form relationships. Canadian youth deserve the opportunities to grow up confidently knowing that their sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions will be celebrated and supported. Achieving this vision of a fully LGBTQ2-affirming country requires empirical descriptions of ongoing conversion therapy practices that will in turn enable us to end conversion therapy, once and for all.

If you want to support Travis’ work, make a tax-deductible gift to our crowdfunding campaign before December 31st. Donations will support his work in conducting research on conversion therapy and ensuring that LGBTQ2+ youth are protected from these inhuman practices.

The post The Threat & Reality of Conversion Therapy in Canada appeared first on Pacific Public Health Foundation.

The objective of the OAP is to help enhance the research enterprise at BCCDC and to increase the opportunities for success at major peer review organizations such as CIHR. We offer three types of funding: i) money for blue sky, discovery, or pilot grants; ii) workshop and team-building grants, to bring colleagues together either for the exchange and discussion of new research and/or its translation into new policy/practice or to help in generation of research teams; iii) research travel awards for investigators to learn new techniques, exchange research information and prepare material for publication.

The deadline for applications is Tuesday, October 1st, 2019 at 4:30pm PST and is open only to faculty members of BCCDC/BCPHL. If you are faculty, please check your inboxes for an email containing an application form and Terms of Reference. If you didn’t receive one, or just would like more info, email: foundation@bccdc.ca

To learn more about the projects funded through the OAP by the BCCDC Foundation, please search this blog for the tag “OAP”.

The post Call for Applications for Fall 2019 OAP Competition Now Open! appeared first on Pacific Public Health Foundation.

Dr. Mark Gilbert and his team have been awarded funds to explore anxiety among clients of SmartSexResource.com’s sexual health chat services for the next year.

Dr. Troy Grennan and team have been granted funding to pilot a novel assay to reduce diagnostic lead time for syphilis in asymptomatic men who have sex with men.

Dr. Tom Kosatsky and the environmental health team have been awarded funding to study the potential toxicity of road dust in the spring in rural BC.

We look forward to seeing the results of these research studies and where they may lead in the future. For BCCDC faculty interested in applying for the next competition, be sure to watch your email inboxes in February for the announcement of the Spring 2019 competition, with a deadline of April 1st.

To see some of our past research successes, click through to our main research page, on the BCCDC Foundation website, or you can review all posts in this blog for other successful OAP applications by clicking on the Open Awards Program category.

The post Open Awards Program: Fall 2018 Competition Successful Applications appeared first on Pacific Public Health Foundation.

It has been globally recognized that gbMSM have a disproportionate burden of syphilis cases but few interventions have yet been found to be effective at stemming the epidemic. The group of researchers at the BC Centre for Disease Control want to understand the underlying trends and systemic determinants of health to be able to develop comprehensive and holistic programs and ultimately, improve the health of gbMSM. They are using a participatory action research model to explore factors contributing to local barriers to health care access, among other social determinants of health.

The preliminary qualitative data was presented at the Gay Men’s Health Summit in November 2017 in Vancouver, with a draft manuscript currently in progress now that the qualitative interviews are complete. Next steps for the coming year include development and completion of a quantitative questionnaire, and development of a database of overarching themes emerging from the interviews.

According to Drs Grennan and Grace,

The results from our qualitative interviews demonstrate some tensions between what individuals know about sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and the risk of acquiring these infections, and how their sexual behaviour plays out. We look forward to delving deeper into these issues with our forthcoming quantitative questionnaire.

The long term goal is to turn research outcomes, from both phases of the study, into actions. It is planned that this will be in the form of development of tools to help medical practitioners guide who would benefit from intervention and in what circumstances it would be appropriate. As well as pinpointing systemic areas that need to be addressed in order to optimize service delivery and access to care for gbMSM individuals, to help inform advocacy to shift public perception and evidence for policy change. The work for this project is taking place over three years.

As Canada’s largest community foundation, Vancouver Foundation is dedicated to creating healthy, vibrant and livable communities across BC.

The post Ongoing Partnership Update: Vancouver Foundation appeared first on Pacific Public Health Foundation.

Dr. Naomi Dove and her team have been awarded funds for: “A pilot study to investigate models for sexual/mental health service integration in the context of population health inequities”.

Dr. Eleni Galanis and her research team have been awarded funding for: “Beyond diarrhea, to disability and death: the hidden consequences of foodborne infections”.

Dr. Amee Manges an her team have been granted funds for: “AntiRetroviral Research fOr Watoto (ARROW): Substudy on the impact of cotrimoxazole on the gut flora of HIV-infected children and adolescents”.

Dr. David Patrick has been awarded funds for: “The BC Generations Project Cohort as a Platform for Discovery in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS): A Pilot Study”.

Dr. Mark Tyndall and Dr. Svetlana Ritovski-Slijepcevic has been awarded funding for: “Integrating research and policy to improve health outcomes for LGBTQ2S youth”.

BCCDC Faculty interested in applying for future funding, be sure to watch your email inboxes in February; the next round of applications will be reviewed in April 2018. To see some of our past research successes, search the blog for entries tagged with #OAP.

The post Open Awards Program: Five Successful Applications for Fall 2017 Competition appeared first on Pacific Public Health Foundation.