Author: Emily Holton

UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA

A University of Alberta clinical trial will screen 1,500 people with point-of-care dual HIV and syphilis test kits in an effort to combat the syphilis outbreak in Edmonton and northern Alberta.

Alberta Health Services declared the outbreak last year after 12 stillborn births and 1,753 newly diagnosed cases of syphilis, 68 per cent of them in the Edmonton area.

Syphilis is a highly infectious sexually transmitted infection with symptoms ranging from genital sores to vision and hearing loss, heart attack and dementia, depending on how long it is left untreated. When women acquire syphilis during pregnancy, it is almost always passed on to the baby, leading to stillbirth or developmental delays. Syphilis can be cured with penicillin.

“The advantage, if these tests work, is that you could provide treatment at the same visit if the test result was positive,” said principal investigator Ameeta Singh, clinical professor of medicine in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and infectious diseases specialist at the Royal Alexandra Hospital and the Edmonton Sexually Transmitted Infections Clinic.

“That would be fantastic because we can prevent the patient from developing further complications and we can also prevent ongoing spread,” said Singh, who is also a member of the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute. “Penicillin renders syphilis non-infectious within 24 hours.”

Canadian-made tests could help prevent future outbreaks, infant deaths

Alberta has one of the highest rates of syphilis in the country, Singh said. Syphilis screening usually involves taking a blood sample and sending it to a lab, where the serum is separated using a centrifuge and then tested. It can take up to two weeks to get results.

“Syphilis affects populations who are at times hard to reach—they may be transient, have unstable housing or may have mental health or addictions issues,” Singh said. “Because of their unstable social situations, they sometimes don’t return for followup.”

The point-of-care tests in the clinical trial allow health-care staff to test for both HIV and syphilis with a simple finger prick blood test, much like the test for blood sugar. Results are returned within five minutes and treatment with penicillin can be provided immediately.

Singh said it is important to test for both syphilis and HIV at the same time because syphilis increases a person’s chances of acquiring or passing on HIV if they are exposed to both infections at the same time.

“This is exciting work that Dr. Singh is leading, ‘implementation science’ that we hope will have a life-changing impact on the health and well-being of moms and their infants,” said Sean B. Rourke, a scientist at MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital of Unity Health Toronto, and director of the CIHR Centre for REACH in HIV/AIDS, which is the major funder of the trial along with strategic funding from the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research (CANFAR).

A major aim for REACH is to bring new testing technologies, including self-testing, point-of-care and multiplex testing, to market in Canada to reach those undiagnosed with HIV, HCV and other STIs (including syphilis). It is also building teams with community stakeholders and affected key populations to ensure that the testing innovations are implemented in the right way to reach those who need them the most, and in ways that provide cultural safety and support.

Rourke recently generated the evidence required by Health Canada to approve the first HIV self-test kits in the country. His collaboration with Singh at the U of A and Alberta Health Services is part of a joint effort to get more tests licensed in Canada. Both test kits that are being evaluated are made by Canadian manufacturers and have been licensed for use in other countries but are not yet approved for use in Canada. As part of this partnership, the companies have committed to apply for Health Canada licensing of their medical devices if the U of A study results are positive.

During the trial, individuals at risk for syphilis and HIV—such as gay and bisexual men, people from Indigenous communities experiencing a resurgence of syphilis, and those experiencing homelessness, mental health issues or addictions—will undergo testing at homeless shelters, the Edmonton Remand Centre, the emergency departments of the Royal Alexandra Hospital and Northeast Community Health Centre, and other community clinics.

All of the participants will also get the standard laboratory test to confirm the accuracy of the trial test kits. Singh said she is hoping to see 90 per cent accuracy.

She noted that while every pregnant woman in Alberta is supposed to be tested for syphilis, often vulnerable women don’t access prenatal care until the time of delivery, when it is too late to avoid transmission to the infant.

“What we are hoping with this project is that if we can reach women in field settings and offer testing in the field, we might eventually be able to reach and treat more women who are infected, thus preventing or reducing the harmful effects of syphilis on both the mother and her unborn child,” she said.

Singh expects the study to take up to 18 months to complete. The project is also supported by Alberta Health Services and Indigenous Services Canada.

THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR

Dr. Annalise Trudell has witnessed the pandemic deepen fault lines across society. As a gender-based violence (GBV) researcher and manager of education, training and research at ANOVA — London, Ontario’s women shelter and sexual assault service provider — Trudell, has seen first-hand the unique challenges and complications brought on by COVID-19.

“From the starting line, we were behind,” she says. “As a GBV sector, we seem dispensable. When there are cuts to be made, we seem to be first up.”

Trudell — who works closely with shelters and rape crisis centres across Ontario — sees how GBV hasn’t kept pace with better-resourced front-line sectors. With the arrival of COVID-19, this reality left the GBV workforce in a precarious situation. “When the pandemic hit, the system just broke open,” she says.

…Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, physician and scientist with the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital, is… conducting research to better understand community responses to the pandemic, across a variety of marginalized populations.

“Our society is not structured in such a way that everyone who needs resources gets access to those resources,” he says. “Health inequities have been highly prevalent for a very long time. And what this pandemic has done is exacerbated them and made them more obvious. It has shown we weren’t well prepared to deal with many of these.”

Using a collaborative, mixed-methods, community-engaged model, Bayoumi and his research team have been working with community organizations serving marginalized groups to determine what is working well during COVID, what can be improved upon, and what can be implemented elsewhere.

One of the projects Bayoumi is evaluating focuses on violence against women. Through engagement of those with lived experience, the study seeks to understand how some Toronto-based GBV organizations have adapted to the pandemic, how contextual factors have influenced processes, and how service adaptations have affected both staff and survivors.

He believes this type of evaluative research will produce positive solutions for those experiencing the greatest need, and quickly. “I’m always hopeful,” he says. “Working with communities committed to change is always invigorating. We are putting forth a tremendous amount of energy and effort to make a change.”

VIDEO: Projections show if we don’t do more to flatten the curve now, we could experience upwards of 60,000 new COVID-19 cases a day in Canada. Flattening the curve in hotspots involves understanding who in those neighbourhoods are most affected by COVID-19, says Dr. Farah Mawani, an epidemiologist at MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital. Dr. Mawani adds the data shows that low-income people and racialized people are most affected by COVID-19 in the GTA, and many of them are in work situations that prevent them from protecting their safety. Resourcing the public health system to ensure we have capacity for testing, contact tracing, supports for people to isolate as necessary and supports such as paid sick days are key measures that would help protect people most affected by COVID-19, says Dr. Mawani.

Watch this interview

When Calvin Little died, no one noticed for a while.

For the last two years of his life, the 63-year-old Torontonian lived in a nondescript east-end apartment — alone, save for a rotating cast of animals he would watch for periods of time.

Little had lived inside the building since August 2018: a place for him to land after a decade of episodic homelessness.

He was funny, friendly and charming, those who knew him said. But he kept his past close to his chest. Sometimes, he’d disappear for a day or two, or venture out to panhandle in the Beaches. When he died, he died in his apartment, quietly and alone.

…Cancer and cardiovascular disease are the most common causes of death among older people who have been homeless, said Dr. Stephen Hwang, director of St. Michael’s MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, who described stark inequalities.

“The life expectancy of someone who is homeless is comparable to someone living back in the Great Depression, before we had antibiotics or pretty much any of the effective medical treatments that we have today,” he said.

From the Toronto Star article:

…Dr. Farah Mawani, a social and psychiatric epidemiologist, said that’s the sort of systemic racism that has put racialized people — and particularly new immigrants — at greater risk during this pandemic.

“We know that there’s a very high portion of racialized immigrants who are highly trained and skilled, but very underemployed. So they’re forced to work in manufacturing because they can’t get other jobs,” she said.“

She said the issue is even worse for temporary foreign workers, whose migration status is tied to their employment at a certain company.

If they complain about poor working conditions, Mawani said, they risk losing not only their income but their place in Canada.

HEALTHY DEBATE

By Nav Persaud, Danielle Martin, Steve Morgan, Marc-André Gagnon

COVID-19 is a terrible virus but offers a valuable lesson. Longstanding health disparities based on race have become front page news, driving home the importance of protecting everyone’s health.

Yet, a new Angus Reid Institute poll shows that many Canadians don’t have insurance that covers essential medicines and many commonly skip taking their pills because of the cost. The national survey confirms that in the midst of a global pandemic, one in four Canadian households has inadequate prescription drug coverage. Women and racialized people (“Canadians who identify as a visible minority”) are more likely to report having no insurance or partial coverage. Lower income households are more than twice as likely to be uninsured or under-insured as those with household incomes over $100,000. Women are more likely to report being uninsured or under-insured than men.

COVID-19 has made this situation dire: more than half a million Canadian houses have lost prescription drug coverage during this year of unprecedented public health and economic crises.

The interaction between race, drug coverage and COVID runs deep. For instance, having poorly controlled diabetes increases the risk of dying from the virus. One would think that every Canadian with diabetes should be all set to face down the pandemic: insulin was discovered almost a hundred years ago in Toronto; the rights to it were sold for just $1; and we have a publicly funded healthcare system. Despite that, millions continue to go without the drugs they need, like insulin.  

Accessing medicines can be the difference between life and death. Sadly, the death toll from COVID-19 in Canada has now passed 10,000. Chronic diseases like diabetes will kill more than 20,000 people this year. The number of lives saved through better access to medicine is hard to know exactly but it is likely in the thousands.

So, if we are “all in this together,” why are some riding crowded buses during a pandemic to jobs that don’t provide insurance for insulin and other life-saving medicines?

“When this pandemic started a lot of folks were talking about it being the great equalizer – we are all in the same situation. We very quickly realized this was not the case.” ~ front-line provider (focus group)

By Drs. Naomi Thulien & Amanda Noble, for Homeless Hub

In June 2020, we received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to lead a knowledge synthesis of promising mental health and substance use practices utilized during the COVID-19 pandemic with young people who were experiencing or had experienced homelessness. 

Instead of conducting a traditional knowledge synthesis by pulling together evidence found in academic journals, we wanted to hear directly from front-line providers and the young people they served. We were fortunate to work with great team of front-line clinicians, researchers, public policy influencers, and people with lived expertise in homelessness, mental health challenges, and substance use to conduct this research. 

Our final report contains survey data from 188 front-line providers across Canada and is supplemented by three focus groups – two with providers and one with young people who have experienced homelessness. We focused on three key domains: 1) pandemic impacts on mental health and substance use patterns; 2) practice adaptations; and 3) promising and transformative approaches. 

Our overall aim was to shed light on promising practice adaptations; however, the evidence we uncovered over the past five months has been less about downstream individual-level interventions and more about the need for upstream structural interventions. While there is a pressing need to understand what individual-level practice adaptations hold promise to meet the mental health and substance use needs of young people who are experiencing or have experienced homelessness (and we do expand on this in our report), it is essential that we situate this need and our response within the broader societal context in which youth exist. 

If the problem of worsening mental health and substance use during this pandemic is caused by/connected to intersecting structural inequities such as racism, insufficient housing, precarious employment, limited social connections, and poverty, and not individual “vulnerability” (a term that denotes weakness and used all too often when referring to youth experiencing homelessness), then it is logical that the proposed solutions should encompass structural interventions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and created a multitude of intersecting inequities that providers and young people are struggling to navigate. It also presents a unique opportunity to reimagine how we serve young people who are experiencing or have experienced homelessness. 

Key Messages

• We must pay special consideration to the mental health and substance use needs of young people with current and past experiences of homelessness, who are more likely than the general population to have pre-existing mental health challenges, struggles with financial hardship, and employment uncertainty.
• Providers must be careful not to inadvertently perpetuate access inequities – already common in this population – by pivoting to phone/virtual care without having a concurrent plan around addressing resource-related barriers to access.
• While it intuitively makes sense to divert young people from the shelter system – especially during a pandemic – we must ensure these young people have the social and economic supports needed not just to survive, but to thrive.

Researchers from MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions and St. Michael’s Hospital are among 250 global experts who contributed to the recently published United Nations’ Research Roadmap for the COVID-19 Recovery.

The Roadmap seeks to address the severe health, humanitarian and socio-economic consequences of the pandemic, and to guide countries toward supporting targeted research so their responses are evidence-informed and focus on those most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and its collateral damage to our economies, health and wellbeing.

The Roadmap highlights 25 research priorities categorized into the five socio-economic pillars identified by the UN in a framework released in April 2020. The pillars include health systems and services, social protection and basic services, economic response and recovery, macroeconomic policies and multilateral collaboration, and social cohesion and community resilience. The MAP/St. Michael’s team focused on economic response and recovery.

Among the recommendations was for countries to invest in research that focuses on how economic recovery policies can protect all workers, ensure their well-being, and promote a resilient workforce, and how workers’ incomes and jobs can be best protected when they are sick or have caregiving responsibilities.

To arrive at these recommendations, Dr. Farah Mawani, a social and psychiatric epidemiologist and postdoctoral fellow at MAP, led a rapid scoping review of existing research on the economic impacts of COVID-19 and previous disastrous events, such as the global economic crisis of 2008 and Ebola.

“When we talk about the economic response, we’re talking about immediate measures decision-makers took to respond to the crisis,” said Dr. Mawani, citing the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) as one such measure. “And when we talk about recovery, we’re talking longer-term. It’s hard to separate them because we’re still responding to a growing crisis, but we need to have a combination of interventions, policies and programs that address the crisis response and address the longer-term needs for recovery.”

“Without research, we don’t know which of those measures are effective or not or who is being left out of various policies and programs,” she said.

Dr. Mawani and her co-authors – Dr. Patricia O’Campo, Dr. Virginia Gunn, Dr. Susitha Wanigaratne, Melissa Perri, Carolyn Ziegler, Aly Kassam, Michelle Anagnostou, Angie An and Dr. Carles Muntaner – found several gaps they identified as high-priority for future research. These gaps are important not only for decision-makers and governments, but for research funding agencies and researchers so they know what kind of research they should be funding and conducting, says Dr. Mawani.

Among the gaps, the team identified that many interventions implemented both during COVID-19 and past crises did not take an equity approach. The interventions targeted some marginalized groups, but left out disabled workers, refugees, Indigenous people and precarious workers.

“They either didn’t specify who the interventions should be targeted towards, or made general, vague statements about those who are ‘vulnerable’ without accurately framing the systemic causes of inequities or vulnerabilities,” said Dr. Mawani.

Dr. Virginia Gunn, a post-doctoral fellow at MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions and a co-author of the Roadmap, says investing in research focused on workers in informal, non-standard, and precarious employment is important, because these workers are often covered by fewer job protections and they are often not eligible for social benefits and supports such as unemployment insurance, supplemental health benefits, or minimum wage legislation.

“These workers’ disadvantage was aggravated and magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic, further widening a range of inequities between them and workers in full-time employment,” said Dr. Gunn. “Investing in research focused on this topic will help us understand the unique needs of these workers so that we can tailor our supports.”

The Roadmap also highlighted a need for research on workers with disabilities as a result of COVID-19. Dr. Mawani says there is not enough focus on this issue currently.

“We hear about workers with disabilities who are at higher risk of serious complications due to COVID-19, which of course is really important,” says Dr. Mawani. “But what hasn’t been focused on is that COVID-19 itself is causing disabilities. What does that mean in terms of increasing disability and the impact of that on workers, job protection, workplaces, and what do countries need to do to prepare for and respond to that?”

The UN says the Roadmap was developed with a “human rights lens” and great care was taken to ensure no one was left out or left behind. The realities of racism, colonialism, sexism and ableism play a role in creating inequities and the conditions for inequities to be exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Dr. Mawani, which is why she and her co-authors explicitly named those systems in their review. She’s pleased to see that reflected in the Roadmap.

“A lot of people shy away from naming those things. But if we don’t name them, we can’t address them.”

An area in the northeast corner of Brampton has a “shocking” 19 per cent COVID-19 test positivity rate — a rate double that of the U.S. — and is leading a list of 30 Greater Toronto neighbourhoods that are seeing alarming numbers of people testing positive for the virus, new data shows.

Peel as a whole is recording a per cent positivity of 9.8 per cent — the highest in the GTA — while neighbourhoods in northwestern Toronto, Scarborough, and southern York Region are also reporting sky-high rates, according to a first-time look at an analysis conducted by the Toronto-based non-profit ICES (formerly the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences). The data covers the first week of November, the most recent time period of which per cent positivity rates are available, and is broken down by postal code to provide a detailed picture of the local severity of the pandemic.

…Epidemiologist Dr. Farah Mawani, of MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at Unity Health Toronto, said the ICES data highlights how the current pandemic response is failing.

In early October, COVID-19 testing was limited just as cases were rising and in Toronto, public health dropped all contact tracing except for high-risk settings, such as schools, hospitals and long-term-care homes.

“That combination, while cases were rising, is a recipe for disaster,” Mawani said. “We are now seeing that disaster unfolding. Those are two key tools to stopping the spread.”

Sir William Osler, the Canadian doctor widely regarded as the father of modern medicine, whose name graces schools and medical institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, held racist views that have been swept under the carpet for more than a century, according to an article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal Monday.

The article, co-authored by Toronto doctor Nav Persaud, argues that Osler continues to be lionized in medical school, a practice that whitewashes his legacy and erases his more offensive statements, which include “I hate Latin Americans,” and “What are we to do when the yellow and brown men begin to swarm over” to Canada, which he considered “a White man’s country.”

“William Osler continues to be held up as an example physicians should follow,” the article states. “As statues of once-revered individuals who participated in racist crimes are being removed around the world, we should change Osler’s place in medical curricula and explicitly address racism in medicine.”

Osler’s outsized presence in medical schools across the English speaking world overshadows the contributions made by lesser-known racialized physicians who practiced during the same era, including Black Civil War veterans Dr. Alexander Thomas Augusta and Dr. Anderson Ruffin Abbott, as well as Indigenous physicians Dr. Oronhyatekha (Burning Sky) and Dr. Peter Edmund Jones.

No hospitals are named after these doctors.

The CMAJ article states that a biographer modified a transcription of an Osler letter, replacing his use of the word “hate” for Latin Americans with “don’t care for.” The statement was ultimately not included in the 1926 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the doctor. The CMAJ article includes an undated illustration that depicts the doctor as an angel, complete with halo and wings, floating above Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, which he helped found.