This year’s event featured a capitalist with a time machine, bringing historic public figures into 2019. As well as being fun and funny, the format allowed attendees to learn how different infectious diseases are transmitted and how outbreaks are solved, as well as scientific breakthroughs that have brought us to our present day medical advancements.

The sold –out event held on October 18th was a great way to inform the public of the work that the CDC does for the people of BC. By visiting clue booths staffed by actual CDC/Labs employees, attendees participated in activities that resulted in learning about things like what lab techs look for in a blood test to identify pathogens; how genome sequencing of a disease can track its spread and how other medical/scientific clues like insect bites can help epidemiologists identify what they might be dealing with.

In addition to the “clue” booths, many of the other programs at the CDC had info booths to help raise the profile of the work done at the BC Centre for Disease Control. Staff from TB, Hepatitis, STI clinic, Community Antimicrobial Stewardship and Harm Reduction, as well as the BCCDC Foundation team, were all present to share activities, treats and info with the 800 attendees.

These events wouldn’t happen without all the dedicated volunteers, so a big shout out to everyone who poured their hearts and brains into this event! If you want to ensure you know about events like this, and other activities, sign up for our newsletter and follow us @bccdcfoundation on social media.

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Moderated by BC’s Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry – basically BC’s Public Health Wonder Woman – we covered important topics like immunization, sexual health, overdose crisis response, and the “hows” of laboratory work.

Speakers included:

• Dr. Bonnie Henry, moderator and BC Provincial Health Officer
• Dr. Monika Naus, Medical Director of the Communicable Diseases & Immunization Services at BCCDC
• Dr. Troy Grennan, physician lead for Provincial HIV/STI Program at BCCDC
• Sara Young, Manager, Hepatitis and Harm Reduction Services at BCCDC
• Dr. Agatha Jassem, Clinical Microbiologist & Program Head, Virology, BCCDC Public Health Laboratory.

We also covered some fun questions like “what’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done in public health?”. Intrigued? Want to hear more? If you missed it, sign up for our newsletter and follow us on social media to be notified of the full podcast episode coming soon!

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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.

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Workshop

Drs Gina Ogilvie and Mark Gilbert and their team have been awarded funding towards, “Supporting Regional Participation in a Collaborative Implementation Science Roundtable” to bring together knowledge users and collaborators with the (CIHR funded) GetCheckedOnline program for a two day meeting to review the research findings to date and arrive at a consensus regarding impacts of the intervention and to identify future research priorities of the team currently assembled, including a framework for an “implementation best practices tool-kit” to assist in translation to other jurisdictions.

Travel

Dr Muhammad Morshed has been awarded funding for “Presenting BCCDC Public Health Laboratory Research at AMMI/CACMID AGM”. This funding, as well as funds from two other sources, enables two of his lab team to present four abstracts on behalf of the BCCDC at the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (AMMI) / Canadian Association of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (CACMID) annual meeting.

Blue Sky

Dr Agatha Jassem and her team have been awarded funding for “Correlating Childhood Viral Exposures to Allergy and Asthma Using Novel Viromic Methods”. This pilot study will expand on previous work looking at known respiratory viral infections acquired in early childhood as potential contributors to allergy and asthma at age five. Advanced lab methods that can detect and characterize all known human viruses will be applied to samples from the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) cohort and linked to clinical data on childhood allergy and asthma. The team plans to use this ‘proof-of-concept’ phase to develop a future large-scale investigation.

BCCDC faculty interested in applying for funding, be sure to watch your email inboxes in August: the next round of applications will be reviewed in October 2017.

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