Health
Northern B.C. doctor to help improve cancer outcomes for B.C. Indigenous Peoples – Alaska Highway News
Dr. Nadine Caron says she hears difficult stories every day from some of her Indigenous patients in rural British Columbia facing a diagnosis of cancer.
They tell her why they didn’t have a family physician to go to first, why they didn’t trust the medical system when they started having symptoms and that no one told them about screening opportunities.
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Caron has already identified through research that First Nations in the province are less likely to survive a cancer diagnosis than non-First Nations in B.C.
Now, through a new position created at the University of British Columbia (UBC), she plans to tackle how to improve not only cancer outcomes but also wellness among Indigenous Peoples.
“I think part of it is, how do we change our health-care system so that we celebrate, as a country, our Indigenous people — so that we actually ensure that our health-care services are a safe space for them that they feel empowered to use, that they have the right to use and benefit from, just like all Canadians,” she said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
Caron was Canada’s first female First Nations general surgeon.
During a ceremony on Monday (Jan. 7), she was named the inaugural First Nations Health Authority chair in cancer and wellness at the university.
Caron, who calls Prince George home, provides surgical cancer care to rural populations, while also serving as co-director of UBC’s Centre for Excellence in Indigenous Health.
Over the course of her five-year term in the position, she plans to take a holistic approach that acknowledges how colonization, racism, marginalization and poverty have led to a disparity in health outcomes.
Caron said she will focus on collecting and reporting Indigenous cancer experiences and outcomes, and better understanding the system’s responsiveness to Indigenous cancer care needs.
In a statement, Dr. Dermot Kelleher, dean of UBC’s faculty of medicine and vice-president of health, said the school is delighted with her appointment.
“The centuries-old knowledge of the importance of wellness, integral to Indigenous traditional learnings, is now a critical principle informing twenty-first century health care.”
For Caron, the appointment is about improving the lives of some of her patients. While lack of access to services is a major contributing factor, the historical treatment of First Nations, Metis and Inuit Canadians has led many to distrust the system.
She told the story of one woman she worked with last year, who was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I explained from the medical point of view what I strongly recommended, which included surgery and would give her an excellent chance of surviving,” Caron said.
The woman asked if it would be possible to do the surgery at Caron’s clinic, but it wasn’t equipped for surgery. Caron tried to convince the woman to go to a different hospital or another medical facility, but she couldn’t be persuaded.
“She eventually said she trusted me, she trusted the space our office could provide her,” but she couldn’t face further involvement with the medical system, Caron said.
“She said that she had had such horrific experiences that she would not go into a hospital.”
Caron was the senior author of the first study comparing cancer development and survival between First Nations and non-First Nations people in B.C. in 2017.
In addition to the lower survival rates, the study published in the journal Cancer Causes & Control also revealed some cancers, including colorectal and cervical, are significantly more common among First Nations.
At the same time, overall cancer incidence among First Nations is lower than among non-First Nations residents, it found.
The study has filled in some knowledge gaps, but Caron said there’s a dearth of research on Indigenous health in Canada and worldwide.
She said she’s come across many questions in her clinical work that led her to search medical literature, only to find the questions hadn’t been asked before, or if they had, they’d never been answered.
“I wanted to be someone who would start to address that gap,” she said.
The position is supported by a $1.5 million contribution from the First Nations Health Authority with matching funds from UBC.
— with files from The Canadian Press
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Interior Health says it delivered nearly 800,000 immunization doses last year — a number almost equal to the region’s population.
The released figure of 784,980 comes during National Immunization Awareness Week, which runs April 22-30.
The health care organization, which serves a large area of around 820,000, says it’s using the occasion to boost vaccine rates even though there may be post-pandemic vaccine fatigue.
“This is a very important initiative because it ensures that communicable diseases stay away from a region,” said Dr. Silvina Mema of Interior Health.
However, not all those doses were for COVID; the tally includes childhood immunizations plus immunizations for adults.
But IHA said immunizations are down from the height of the pandemic, when COVID vaccines were rolled out, though it seems to be on par with previous pre-pandemic years.
Interior Health says it’d like to see the overall immunization rate rise.
“Certainly there are some folks who have decided a vaccine is not for them. And they have their reasons,” said Jonathan Spence, manager of communicable disease prevention and control at Interior Health.
“I think there’s a lot of people who are hesitant, but that’s just simply because they have questions.
“And that’s actually part of what we’re celebrating this week is those public health nurses, those pharmacists, who can answer questions and answer questions with really good information around immunization.”
Mima echoed that sentiment.
“We take immunization very seriously. It’s a science-based program that has saved countless lives across the world and eliminated diseases that were before a threat and now we don’t see them anymore,” she said.
“So immunization is very important.”
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that samples of pasteurized milk had tested positive for remnants of the bird flu virus that has infected dairy cows.
The agency stressed that the material is inactivated and that the findings “do not represent actual virus that may be a risk to consumers.” Officials added that they’re continuing to study the issue.
“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the FDA said in a statement.
The announcement comes nearly a month after an avian influenza virus that has sickened millions of wild and commercial birds in recent years was detected in dairy cows in at least eight states. The Agriculture Department says 33 herds have been affected to date.
FDA officials didn’t indicate how many samples they tested or where they were obtained. The agency has been evaluating milk during processing and from grocery stores, officials said. Results of additional tests are expected in “the next few days to weeks.”
The PCR lab test the FDA used would have detected viral genetic material even after live virus was killed by pasteurization, or heat treatment, said Lee-Ann Jaykus, an emeritus food microbiologist and virologist at North Carolina State University
“There is no evidence to date that this is infectious virus and the FDA is following up on that,” Jaykus said.
Officials with the FDA and the USDA had previously said milk from affected cattle did not enter the commercial supply. Milk from sick animals is supposed to be diverted and destroyed. Federal regulations require milk that enters interstate commerce to be pasteurized.
Because the detection of the bird flu virus known as Type A H5N1 in dairy cattle is new and the situation is evolving, no studies on the effects of pasteurization on the virus have been completed, FDA officials said. But past research shows that pasteurization is “very likely” to inactivate heat-sensitive viruses like H5N1, the agency added.
Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the International Dairy Foods Association, said that time and temperature regulations for pasteurization ensure that the commercial U.S. milk supply is safe. Remnants of the virus “have zero impact on human health,” he wrote in an email.
Scientists confirmed the H5N1 virus in dairy cows in March after weeks of reports that cows in Texas were suffering from a mysterious malady. The cows were lethargic and saw a dramatic reduction in milk production. Although the H5N1 virus is lethal to commercial poultry, most infected cattle seem to recover within two weeks, experts said.
To date, two people in U.S. have been infected with bird flu. A Texas dairy worker who was in close contact with an infected cow recently developed a mild eye infection and has recovered. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program caught it while killing infected birds at a Colorado poultry farm. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Canada is about where it should be when it comes to childhood vaccines, but for adult vaccinations it’s a different story.
Dr. Vivien Brown of Immunize Canada says the overall population should have rates of between 80 and 90 per cent for most vaccines, but that is not the case.
She says most children are in that range but not for adult vaccines and ultimately the most at-risk populations are not being reached.
She says the population is under immunized for conditions such as pneumonia, shingles, tetanus, and pertussis.
Brown wants people to talk with their family physician or pharmacist to see if they are up-to-date on vaccines, and to get caught up because many are “killer diseases.”
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