Travel-bug research urged
Toronto is a “ lightning rod” for infectious diseases, given the number of residents who could unwittingly contract a virus while travelling overseas, says a leading researcher in the field.
“ You can get anywhere, any time and interact with anyone and just about acquire anything,” says Dr. Kevin Kain, director of the global health program at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Molecular Medicine.
“ And then you will come back and present this novel disease to your North American physician and that health care system has to be able to handle it except, unfortunately, we are not well prepared for that.”
Kain, who’s also director of the Centre for Travel and Tropical Medicine at Toronto General Hospital, said officials should be studying travellers and the illnesses they bring home in order to understand and cope with widespread outbreaks of diseases such as the feared avian flu pandemic.
“ Even though we are able to control airport crossings, there are porous borders in Asia and Africa, and if the avian influenza gets to Africa, it’s the end of the story,” he told a symposium held to mark the move of some University Health Network researchers into the MaRS Collaboration Centre downtown. The symposium spoke to the vision behind MaRS, which aims to bring science, innovation and business ideas under one roof.
Since 54 per cent of the city’s population is visible minorities, Toronto is a great place to study how infectious diseases travel around the world, Kain said. That’s because residents are continually visiting family overseas and the city also has a sizable population of business travellers.
Kain explained that Canadians who travel back to their home countries, often after years away, encounter diseases like malaria or tuberculosis that didn’t exist when they lived there. And their children, who are born in Canada, have no immunity to these diseases. The researcher himself landed in a hospital in New Zealand last week after he fell off a bike and suffered a minor neck fracture. It drove home the point that travellers leave themselves open to acquiring all kinds of infection, even in hospital settings, which he underscored by showing a slide of a pair of surgical gloves — still spotted with blood — that had been washed and were drying in a Vietnamese hospital.
Infectious diseases cause the biggest impact on our economy and business people are often the most frequent travellers. Al- Karim Rehemtula, vicepresident of business development with a biomedical company called University Medical Discoveries Inc., says our multicultural population gives Canada a competitive edge in the world market because we are able to send people to interact locally.
“ But if we can’t recognize how they got sick, they will not be productive and there can be economic implications both at home and abroad.” With drug resistant tuberculosis, malaria and HIV causing the greatest number of illness and deaths in the world, Kain wants to shift the focus of how communicable diseases are being addressed. He is frustrated with the obsession of medical research trying to kill the bug that causes disease and not paying enough attention to a human’s response when they first get sick.