ARCHIVED - Research About – Population and Public Health

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For the past 10 years, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has supported better health and health care for Canadians. As the Government of Canada's health research investment agency, CIHR enables the creation of evidence-based knowledge and its transformation into improved treatments, prevention and diagnoses, new products and services, and a stronger, patient-oriented health-care system. Composed of 13 internationally recognized Institutes, CIHR supports more than 13,600 health researchers and trainees across Canada. Through CIHR, the Government of Canada invested approximately $87.9 million in 2009–10 in population and public health research.

The Facts

• Canadians living in the least affluent neighbourhoods are 30% more likely to have an injury leading to hospitalization than people living in the most affluent areas.¹
• While Canadians who live in poorer neighbourhoods are more likely to have heart attacks than those in more-affluent areas, patients receive about the same quality of care across the country, regardless of their socio-economic status.²
• In Canada in 2007–08, 7.7% of households – or almost 956,000 – experienced food insecurity, which occurs when food quality and/or quantity are compromised, typically because of lack of money.³
• Nine out of 10 Canadians over the age of 20 years have at least one of the following risk factors for cardiovascular disease: smoking, physical inactivity during leisure time, less than the recommended daily consumption of vegetables and fruit, stress, overweight or obesity, high blood pressure or diabetes.⁴

Sources:

1. Canadian Institute of Health Information: Media release for Injury Hospitalizations and Socio-Economic Status
2. Canadian Institute of Health Information: Media release for Health Indicators 2010
3. Statistics Canada: Household food insecurity, 2007–2008
4. Public Health Agency of Canada: 2009 Tracking Heart Disease and Stroke in Canada

Finding Solutions

Lessons from H1N1 will guide future vaccine rollouts

While memories of the H1N1 vaccine rollout are still reasonably fresh in people's minds, Dr. Kumanan Wilson of the University of Ottawa is investigating what worked and what didn't from the public's perspective. "We have an opportunity to learn from the emergent release of the vaccine, which was a unique situation," says Dr. Wilson, a Canada Research Chair in Public Health Policy. "We need to know what it was that resulted in people being willing to take the vaccine and what turned them off." While demand for the H1N1 vaccine was initially strong, only 40% of Canadians eventually got the shot. That's partly because the public is becoming increasingly hesitant about vaccines, he says. "We saw it with the HPV vaccine and we saw it with H1N1. We're going to have to work harder to get the public to accept these vaccines. Failure to do so will have real health costs." Published results from the project will provide valuable insights to guide future vaccine rollouts.

Waterloo researcher warns of China's tobacco epidemic

A tobacco epidemic is raging in China, where more than 50% of men smoke and approximately one million smokers die of tobacco-related diseases each year. The 20-country International Tobacco Control (ITC) Project, led by Dr. Geoffrey Fong of the University of Waterloo, recently published a supplement of 11 articles in Tobacco Control, reporting on its findings in China. One article reported that Chinese cigarettes have three times the levels of lead, cadmium, and arsenic of Canadian cigarettes. This constitutes a global public health concern, as exports of Chinese cigarettes continue to increase. It also highlights the importance of establishing regulatory standards for tobacco products, which, surprisingly, are among the least regulated consumer products in the world. "It is fundamentally wrong that consumers in many countries know about the content of the chocolate bars they eat, but nothing about the content of cigarettes they smoke," says Dr. Fong.

Research aims to prevent good drugs from doing bad things

Sometimes medications intended to fix one health condition may inadvertently cause another. Dr. Arno Siraki of the University of Alberta is investigating drugs of similar chemical structure used in treating heart conditions and cancer that have been linked to agranulocytosis, a condition in which white blood cell levels become dangerously low, leaving the patient vulnerable to infection. The goal is to find out which substances produced in metabolizing the drugs trigger agranulocytosis. "The ideal outcome would be to understand this mechanism with one class of drugs so that we can apply it to the side-effects seen from different drug classes," says Dr. Siraki. "Right now, we're trying to link the biochemistry that we've seen happening at the molecular level with what's happening at the animal model level."

Twitter traffic could help track disease

What do you get when you blend information technology, social media and epidemiology? Dr. Gunther Eysenbach of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at the University Health Network coined the term infodemiology, referring to the science of capturing and analyzing data on how people obtain and exchange information about the spread of disease via the Internet. Its purpose is to monitor health and inform public policy. In 2007, Dr. Eysenbach demonstrated how people's use of Google searches of "flu" and "flu symptoms" correlated with outbreaks of influenza. He has since moved on to studying Twitter traffic during last year's H1N1 outbreak, collecting some 2 million tweets and analyzing them for a more accurate picture of what people were reading and thinking about and intending to do during the pandemic. While the Twitter study is retrospective, lessons learned from it soon could help create "real-time" reports to keep public health authorities in the know and able to respond to public concerns as they arise.

For More Information

The CIHR Institute of Population and Public Health (CIHR-IPPH) is supporting innovative research to understand the impacts of multi-level program and policy interventions on health improvements. This renewed focus requires researchers and other stakeholders to explore pathways to health equity so that all people can reach their full health potential regardless of gender, race or socioeconomic status. To learn more about these priorities and other CIHR-IPPH activities, please visit the Institute's website.

For more information, go to ARCHIVED - Your Health Research Dollars at Work