Françoise Makanda

U of T's Dalla Lana School of Public Health to launch master's program in Black health next year

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 15:27:01 +0000

U of T's Dalla Lana School of Public Health to launch master's program in Black health next year

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 07/04/2022 - 11:27

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Roberta Timothy, Black health lead at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, led the creation of the school's new master of public health (MPH) Black health program (photo by Adam Coish Photography)

Françoise Makanda

Topic

Our Community

Black

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Health

The ��Ƶ’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health is set to launch its new master of public health (MPH) in Black health in the fall of 2023.

Roberta Timothy, the school’s Black health lead, led the creation of the program in just five months – it was expected to take 18 – and believes it’s the first of its kind globally.

She said she couldn’t wait to share the news.

“I put the message out because when I think about the process, it’s emotional for me – and it’s emotional for me because this should not be, nor can it be, the only master’s in Black health that exists,” says Timothy who is an assistant professor of social and behavioural health.

“I don’t think I can fully feel the impact of that and the honour that led me to this journey.”

The new program, which will take applications from October 2022 to January 2023, will launch with an inaugural cohort of 10 students. It is inspired by the school’s MPH in Indigenous Health. In fact, Timothy says that her counterparts at the Waakebiness Institute for Indigenous Health have been instrumental in helping her develop the program so quickly.

“Indigenous Health leads shared how they did their programming and proposal with us,“ she says. “I had a space to adapt and move forward to put Black health first. That’s solidarity [at] work.”

Students will have six core courses alongside general requirements found in typical MPH programs, which include quantitative and qualitative research as well as introductions to public health sciences and practicums.

The core courses will include: a socio-historical overview of Black health, chronic diseases and reproductive health; decolonizing theory and methods in Black health research; transnational Black health policy and practice; and Black resistance in health.

Timothy says community elders will be highly involved in some of the courses that require a retrospective look. She has already secured support from community organizations to facilitate practicums and recruited program co-ordinator Rochelle Parcells for administrative support.

For now, core courses will be reserved for the inaugural cohort, with some availability to all students at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. But with more funding and academic support for collaboration in Black health, Timothy says she hopes there may be “other spaces where people can actually take those classes.”

The program focuses on Black Health in its plurality, bringing the perspective of the diaspora in all course elements. Timothy is eager to look past local health, citing the 1.55 billion Black people living worldwide.

“Everything that happens in the Black community and Black health, if you look at it globally, there’s a connection,” she says. “The program is really going to integrate some of those pieces.”

Timothy says she received an immediate response from the community. “There are MDs who are like, ‘I’m done my career and if I had this program, I wish I could do it. I still want to do it.’ I’m getting all these moving messages.”

Timothy is hopeful the new program will spur scholars at other universities to launch similar efforts. She also stresses that speed at which the program came together owes much the work of those who came before her.

“I really think it’s ancestor-led,” she says. “I could not do this on my own. If we look at our thousands of years of African traditions and the connections of what our people have gone through in the continent and the diaspora, this program could not be done in five months. I don’t take props for that.”

With 'baby steps,' effort to Indigenize public health and preventive medicine program moves forward

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 09 May 2022 13:26:34 +0000

With 'baby steps,' effort to Indigenize public health and preventive medicine program moves forward

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 05/09/2022 - 09:26

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From left to right: Dawn T. Maracle, Angela Mashford-Pringle and Onye Nnorom are integrating Indigenous teachings into the curriculum of the public health and preventive medicine program (Mashford-Pringle photo by Pheasant Lane Photography)

Françoise Makanda

Topic

Our Community

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Indigenous

The public health and preventive medicine program, an accredited post-graduate training program of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, is taking its first steps to Indigenize its curriculum.

The effort is being led by a working group comprising ��Ƶ Assistant Professors Angela Mashford-Pringle, Barry Pakes, Onye Nnorom and Professor Ross Upshur – all from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. They are collaborating with consultant Dawn T. Maracle and resident Mary Choi.

“We hope to Indigenize or, at least, decolonize our curriculum,” says Nnorom. “This is a baby step.”

With Maracle’s guidance, residents incorporated relevant Indigenous knowledge in lectures with peers on standard public health content. The level of expertise and standards expected for the roles is significant as residents are often asked to prepare rounds for peers and faculty members across the province.

The project, which has involved nearly three years of consultations, began as a pilot last fall. Maracle, who is Mohawk from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory and executive director at HOPES Indigenous Training Network (Healing Our Peoples through Education and Social Justice), and Mashford-Pringle, an Algonquin of the Timiskaming First Nation who is Indigenous health lead at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, reviewed the curriculum and guided students throughout the pilot.

“We did a land acknowledgment field trip with residents last June,” says Maracle. “We talked with senior residents about positionality and going deep into land acknowledgements – how to enact them and why we do them.

“Residents were so moved by the experience that they initiated leadership steps to create their own document about what actions they can take through their land acknowledgements, including partnering with Indigenous organizations and institutions about Indigenous-led solutions and ideas.”

They also created a living document about their commitments that they plan to pass on to future residents.

Indigenous knowledge should never be siloed, Maracle explains.

“Siloed topics is an old Western way to look at things – Indigenous knowledge needs to be integrated at every level,” says Maracle. “It’s so well documented that the health profession is underprepared to work with racialized populations. We’ve seen stories of them being treated poorly in the system.”

Maracle marvels at Graham Hingangaroa Smith, who, as Auckland University’s former pro vice-chancellor, included Maori content in every course in the 1990s.

“Canada is woefully behind,” says Maracle. “People were fighting for one Indigenous course in a variety of programs and that was 30 years ago. We should be far ahead of that. There are Indigenous issues to consider in public health as well as in many other topics. So, while there are absolutely inequity and population health issues, there should be Indigenous health throughout the medical curriculum.

“It is the only way to prepare the health profession to competently do their jobs.”

The courses are not easy; Mashford-Pringle says that the subject matter is uncomfortable.

“It’s feeling like you’ve got a wool sweater on, and you have a wool allergy,” she says. “You will start to understand it’s not just Indigenous Peoples, but People of Colour, ableism, sexism. You’ll start to open up that intersectionality piece and you’ll say, ‘Wait a second, I’m complicit and I didn’t know that was a problem.’”

A grant from the Temerty Faculty of Medicine supported Maracle’s efforts to offer guidance to students in the fall, but more is needed, Mashford-Pringle says. “I know there is a thirst for this knowledge, but we don’t have enough Indigenous people doing this kind of work at U of T, or more broadly,” she says.

Nnorom adds that, while the training and tool kits are useful, they remain a poor substitute for the lived experience and support from experts such as Maracle and Mashford-Pringle – and that additional support is key to truly Indigenize the curriculum.

Nnorom says her colleague at the University of Ottawa, Dr. Sarah Funnell, shares a similar point of view.

“Dr. Funnell says what we need to be aiming for is that our residents, when they graduate as public health practitioners, are trauma-informed, culturally safe and have an anti-racist lens to their practice,” says Nnorom. “So, for us, it was [figuring out] how do we weave in concepts of Indigenous knowing into the curriculum instead of it being a standalone thing like an Indigenous health lecture.”

The death of Joyce Echaquan in a Quebec hospital two years ago demonstrated how dire the situation can be for Indigenous patients seeking health care and how urgently changes are needed.

“I’m sick of hearing community members tell me how poorly they were treated in different sectors – specifically the health-care sector,” says Mashford-Pringle. “And these are public health professionals. These are going to be our future medical officers of health in public health units.”

Pakes, Nnorom and Maracle have met with other program leads in Ontario to scale up this initiative.

“If I had a magic wand, the whole thing [system] needs to be overhauled – with those in power behind us, resourcing the initiative, in alignment with the (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s) Calls to Action. There must be truth, justice and reconciliation and most people don’t yet know what that means,” says Maracle.

“It’s going to take a long time. The Honourable Murray Sinclair said, ‘Education got us into this mess, it will get us out.’ But we have to work together.”

Through quilting, PhD student accepts her sleeplessness and challenges the 'sleep industrial complex'

geoff.vendeville — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 17:31:55 +0000

Through quilting, PhD student accepts her sleeplessness and challenges the 'sleep industrial complex'

geoff.vendeville Thu, 11/25/2021 - 12:31

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Kristie Serota, a PhD student in public health, made a quilt to describe her relationship with sleeplessness and challenge the conception of insomnia as a medical disorder (photos courtesy of Kristie Serota)

Françoise Makanda

Topic

Breaking Research

COVID-19

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Public Health

Sleep

About one-in-four adults in Canada reports being dissatisfied with their sleep. But instead of fighting sleeplessness, Kristie Serota chose to embrace it.

The PhD candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health took up quilting in the wee hours to document her relationship with sleeplessness – and to critique what some researchers call the “sleep industrial complex.”

In the latest issue of Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, she says nocturnal quilting helped her accept sleeplessness as a part of her life rather than a medical disorder in need of fixing – an insight that speaks to a larger public health issue related to precarious employment, inflexible work schedules and other stressors that often disproportionately affect marginalized groups.

Kristie Serota

“You know sporadically, periodically or continuously having trouble falling asleep and staying asleep is just a normal part of our human experience, and yet we have special mattresses, oil diffusers, teas and meditation,” Serota says. “Who is benefitting from this?”

Serota came up with the idea of quilting to critique the “biomedical construction of sleeplessness as insomnia” during a narrative research course taught by Michael Atkinson, a professor at Dalla Lana who specializes in the study of suffering and pain across cultures and health-care contexts.

The course challenges students to recount a personal health experience using a medium of their choice.

Although sleep aids represent a multi-billion-dollar market, Atkinson notes these products do not address the core causes of insomnia. “It doesn’t fix the conditions of your existence,” he says. “You still have to get up early. You still have to go to work. You still live within those structures. You still have anxieties.”

Atkinson says the influence of one's social climate on sleep cannot be underestimated. Studies suggest that socially marginalized people, including disadvantaged women, are most vulnerable to insomnia.

“The most vulnerable members of any social structure usually report higher in categories related to population health conditions and this is certainly true of insomnia,” Atkinson says.

While there is a substantial body of research on sleep and a massive sleep product industry, there is relatively little public-health research on the subject, Atkinson says – except for a small area of scholarship on the sleep industrial complex.

He says it may be time to pay greater attention to the social causes of insomnia, which Atkinson categorizes as an invisible disability.

With the shift in work schedules during the pandemic, many have experienced disruptions to their sleep for better or worse. While added anxiety has kept some up at night, others have said remote work has given them greater flexibility catch some shut-eye according to their own schedule.

In Serota's case, she says working remotely allowed her to follow a sleep cycle that matches her internal clock.

“I have just embraced sleeplessness and instead of fighting against myself and getting really frustrated and worked up that I can’t fall asleep. I just get out of bed and go do something else, and then wait until I feel tired and then say ‘Okay, I guess, now is when I’m going to go to sleep,'” she says.

However, Serota acknowledges that embracing sleeplessness requires a flexible work schedule that isn't available to everyone.

Atkinson, too, says a nine-to-five work schedule, plus after-hours work demands, can cause stress that makes it difficult to sleep.

“We’ve got these nine-to-five schedules or whatever schedules that structure our existence,” he says. “But we take so much of that home and it’s never over, and so we’re either working late into the night, or we have 100 million things in our head at night. And this is such a common thing.

“You’re not able to sleep within the confines of that structure,“ he adds. “You never get to sleep, and then it creates more anxiety when you try to sleep because you’re constantly worried.”

Atkinson recommends looking into health interventions that could promote work-life balance: changing the length of work shifts, giving employees the ability to work from home and reducing job insecurity.

On a cultural level, he says it is worth re-examining the idea that living with stress that keeps us up at night is natural. “The worst thing that happens is that we assume culturally that the lack of sleep is normal,” he says.

Black Health Education Collaborative develops primer for Black health curriculum

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 16:48:46 +0000

Black Health Education Collaborative develops primer for Black health curriculum

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 10/07/2021 - 12:48

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Onye Nnorom, an assistant professor at the ��Ƶ’s Dalla Lana School of Pubic Health with a cross-appointment in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, helped create the Black Health Education Collaborative (photo courtesy of Onye Nnorom)

Françoise Makanda

Topic

Our Community

Anti-Black Racism

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Black

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Health

A group of prominent Black health researchers in Canada have come together to provide Black health education for health professionals and students.

The first module from the Black Health Education Collaborative (BHEC) will be available to students next year. The resource serves as a foundation for all health professionals on critical information about Black health in Canada.

“Due to the racial disparities amplified in this pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, there is a greater awareness of anti-Black racism and its impacts on health,” says Onye Nnorom, an assistant professor at the ��Ƶ’s Dalla Lana School of Pubic Health and one of the BHEC’s three co-leads.

“The increase in public consciousness has been a silver lining in a very terrible storm that has been all of our lives for the last 18 months or more.”

Nnorom initiated the project with other prominent Black health leaders in Canada a few years after she became the Black health lead at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s MD Program, where she is cross-appointed.

She was eager to develop a health primer but was short on resources.

“I needed to know what the standards are, what needs to be on exams – otherwise I’m kind of just decoration here,” Nnorom says.

While the Black student population in both the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health has grown in recent years, Nnorom says the curricula is still missing critical inclusions related to Black health. For example, she says Canadian medical education still uses data from the United States – with no Canadian context – and often focuses on chronic disease prevalence among Black people.

“Students are given the impression that there is something cultural, some knowledge lacking or some other deficit with the marginalized community as to why they have disparities – as opposed to understanding that these are rooted in structural racism and oppression,” Nnorom says.

OmiSoore Dryden

Nnorom teamed up with Associate Professor OmiSoore Dryden, the James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies in the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University, to provide insights into social determinants of health and their impact on Black health and academic critical race theory. Together, they formed a national group to consult on health primers.

A proposal was drafted in 2018, and consultations followed a year later with medical and public health students and scholars. The group built enough material to make its case, presenting at webinars and workshops. Members met sporadically to solidify their pitch. That’s until the pandemic hit and the work was forced to take a short pause.

But the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following George Floyd’s death spurred a renewed demand for a primer.

The group finished what they started.

“Working with my colleagues allowed us to pool our resources and our expertise in Black studies, critical race theory, health, clinical practices, public health and medical education,” says Dryden. “Working together during the renewed Black Lives Matter protests, and the impact the pandemic has had on our communities, allowed us to minimize our isolation while sharing resources.”

BHEC welcomed its first executive director in August. Dalla Lana Assistant Professor Sume Ndumbe-Eyoh’s new role is a continuation of her decade-long journey to understand social determinants of health across Canada. Now, she has the opportunity to focus exclusively on Black health with a national scope.

Sume Ndumbe-Eyoh

“Focusing on health equity and social determinants of health just felt like a natural space to be in because I’ve always understood health as something which exists beyond disease and which has really shaped me,” Ndumbe-Eyoh says.

“If you’re going to medical school right now, that should be part of what you’re learning. If you’re going through a school of public health, that should be included as part of what you’ll learn. We should not have folks graduating who do not understand that racism affects health and who don’t have the skills to address anti-Black racism.”

Born and raised in Cameroon, Ndumbe-Eyoh says she noticed the disconnect between public health messaging and the realities she and her friends were living through. A popular campaign in Cameroon got her interested in public health programs and interventions. At Dalla Lana, she studied the social dimensions of HIV/AIDS in public health.

Ndumbe-Eyoh says that mainstream media have finally taken notice of an issue activists like herself have been pushing to advance for many years.

“I think the public consciousness, at least for white folks, appears to be shifting,” says Ndumbe-Eyoh. “I say ‘appears’ because I have many question marks around that. I think for those of us who’ve been doing this work for a while, the work is always ongoing. What I’ve seen shift is that more mainstream organizations are probably making space for Black-led work on anti-Black racism.”

Ndumbe-Eyoh hopes health professionals will also be given some insights into the complexities Black community members face given their diverse experiences, social backgrounds, genders and incomes. As part of her first months in her role, Ndumbe-Eyoh is eager to lay out the foundations of Black Health to medical students.

BHEC is also developing a continuing professional development program for clinicians and health practitioners.

“We will be developing resources to support faculty development. In the last year, a lot of folks are being pulled into teaching about anti-racism and Black health who need a community of practice,” says Ndumbe-Eyoh.

Ndumbe-Eyoh’s office will develop resources to support faculty with the assistance of researchers in the community who can offer some research and practical perspectives in teaching anti-racism.

The program began with seed funding of $1.7 million, with support from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Medicine. BHEC is seeking more funding to expand its work to include mentorship, a community of practice for scholars and educators, publications and providing research and training.

“It is my hope that our work influences the culture of medical education through new structures that specifically address Black health and wellness,” says Dryden. “I hope that health learners will develop the skills necessary to provide appropriate care to Black and African Nova Scotian communities across the country. And it is my hope that health educators will develop and update their skills to better equip our health learners.”

Researchers explore alternating diets to promote weight loss

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 16:28:48 +0000

Researchers explore alternating diets to promote weight loss

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 08/23/2021 - 12:28

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(Photo by Francesco Carta via Getty Images)

Françoise Makanda

Topic

Breaking Research

Nearly 80 per cent of participants in a ��Ƶ study lost a “clinically significant” amount of body weight in less than two years after following three successive and varying diets.

The dieters followed, in sequence, a calorie-restrictive diet, a low-carb/high-fat diet and an intermittent fasting diet, losing 11.1 kilograms on average – almost 10 percent of their body weight.

The results were published in the journal Nutrition.

“Almost 80 per cent of participants lost a clinically significant amount of weight,” says Rebecca Christensen, a PhD candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health who led the study. “This is important because losing just five per cent of your body weight is associated with improvements in cardiometabolic function and other health concerns.

“That lets us know that we have a lot of different tools in the toolbox to pick from when initiating a dietary intervention.”

Christensen says that staying on the same diet can be tough, which is why she is pleased that the study’s findings suggest there may be an alternative.

“It can be quite hard for patients to maintain dietary interventions,” she says. “This might be where successive diets have an advantage as changing things up makes it easier to stick to a diet.”

As more people attempt to shed their pandemic weight, Christensen says she also found that there is no right month to start your diet. Rather, it is just about getting started.

She adds that the goal doesn’t have to be a very low Body Mass Index, or BMI.

“We know that that’s not necessarily feasible,” she says. “But the very least they are reaching the weight that we know is beneficial for their health which is why we want to do the intervention.”

U of T epidemiology students release playbook for their popular COVID-19 dashboard

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 16:00:10 +0000

U of T epidemiology students release playbook for their popular COVID-19 dashboard

geoff.vendeville Wed, 08/18/2021 - 12:00

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Isha Berry, a PhD student at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, is the co-creator of the COVID-19 in Canada open data dashboard (photo courtesy of CIHR)

Françoise Makanda

Topic

Our Community

Coronavirus

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Graduate Students

A popular student-led pandemic dashboard just published its playbook allowing anyone to use its data on COVID-19 trends in Canada.

“We have some graphs and maps showing how the data can be used,” says Isha Berry, one of the dashboard's creators and a PhD student in epidemiology at the ��Ƶ's Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “It’s very illustrative, but it allows people to get an idea of what you can do.”

The methods paper, published in the journal, Scientific Data, describes the data descriptors that were used to inform the daily reports for the dashboard, COVID-19 in Canada.

“The data descriptor is just an overview of our whole methodology process. We have a technical report that we have written up, but we knew that it’s not super easy to always find a technical report or to know what to look for,” Berry says.

The paper shows how the students worked with COVID-19 data that’s reported in different ways across jurisdictions. British Columbia, for example, doesn't report cases on weekends. Some provinces break down COVID-19 cases by age group, while other provinces don't.

Berry is seeking more information on travel-related cases since borders are reopening and they were initially the source of virus transmission. “As we start opening it will be really useful to continue to gather that data because I think [border transmission] will be a bigger source at some point if we are able to contain our domestic transmission,” Berry says.

Dashboard co-lead and PhD student at Dalla Lana Jean-Paul Soucy wants a breakdown of case severity by vaccination status.

“I hope we see more regional data on hospitalizations and data on severe outcomes by vaccination status. The latter will help bolster the case for vaccination," he said. "Hospitalizations due to COVID are in the spotlight in the United States right now, and the Department of Health and Human Services provides information on how local hospitals are affected by the pandemic to a level we can only dream of in Canada.”

COVID-19 case and mortality epidemic curves in Canada. Daily reported (a) cases and (b) mortality with seven-day moving averages (bold line), across Canada since the first announced case on Jan. 25, 2020 up to Dec. 21, 2020.

Berry has learned that observing a weekly case average, as opposed to daily case counts, provides better insights into trends. It helps her team see how things will unfold before they happen. But, like any open-access software, users have free rein over how they interpret the data. Transparency is key.

“It really allows people to conduct analysis in real-time, especially when this is open data that’s published every day,” she says. “We really rely on lots of these open, publicly available data sets to forecast, understand and anticipate what policies might need to be implemented.”

PhD Program Director Laura Rosella, an associate professor at Dalla Lana, agrees that open-access data is important for transparency and reproducibility.

“Of course, not everyone will have the ability to use the data but knowing it’s there and that people with different skills and abilities can work on it helps build trust and can enhance the insights by opening data analysis up to a broader range of skillsets,” Rosella said.

Rosella said she is proud of the students who got the dashboard project off the ground a year-and-a-half ago. “One reason I think they were able to push this so far is the willingness of this generation of students to see difficult problems as a team sport and one where putting different skills together can achieve something really powerful.”

Initially, Berry and Soucy were the only two students working on the dashboard. The team grew to 16 U of T and University of Guelph students, and by June of this year, the team had automated some processes to make data curation easier.

“When we started, there was no one else really doing it. It didn’t really exist for Canada, and now there are so many different data sources that have been so open,” Berry says. “I don’t know to what extent we’ve been helping that, but I think something that’s really been cool is to see that.”

This work was supported by U of T’s COVID-19 Student Engagement Award.

U of T researcher Roberta Timothy lays groundwork for master's program in Black health

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 16:18:46 +0000

U of T researcher Roberta Timothy lays groundwork for master's program in Black health

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 07/15/2021 - 12:18

Cutline

(Photo by Adam Coish)

Françoise Makanda

Topic

Our Community

Black

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

As the first Black health lead at the ��Ƶ’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, one of Roberta Timothy’s projects is developing a master of public health program (MPH) in Black Health.

She says the two-year program, which will take approximately 18 months to put together, will revolutionize public health and unearth important Black health experiences.

“We’re talking about curriculum change and how to progress,” says Timothy, who is an assistant professor at the school. “We need Black communities and Black voices in this work. This program is going to be an example of how we do that. I am excited.”

The MPH will look at Black health and well-being, the impact of anti-racism on health, maternal health, the intersectionality of Black Elders and children, the relationship between these generations and its effect on community health.

Timothy would also like to explore chronic illnesses among Black people and their treatment within the health-care system. The intersectional perspective is key, she says, since the Black community is not homogeneous – a fact she says is often overlooked in conversations about Black health.

“There are Black folks from working-class neighbourhoods, Black refugees, Black queer folks, Black people living with disabilities, Black Elders and Black children. We are really looking at the impact of health outcomes based on anti-Black racism and wellness for all these different people.”

Race is a salient factor for many Black people, adds Timothy. However, she says that, within the community, there are intersections that make the understanding of Black health needs much more complex – and that resisting anti-Black racism helps to dismantle homogeneity.

She hopes the new curriculum will help demonstrate what types of wellness systems are working in the Black community.

Timothy’s target audience is primarily Black researchers and the next generation of Black health practitioners, but she says allies will have the opportunity to take the program as well.

“There’s a lack of Black students in public health,” she says. “They’re not getting enough learning about Black health in the current curriculum. This is for us, for our communities and for folks who want to do solidarity work.”

The program comes at a time when race-based data confirms that Black people have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. “They didn’t include us in COVID-19,” says Timothy, “but we are going to include ourselves, our communities, and take our wellness back and initiate interventions that will support it.”

Timothy says she hopes to garner enough funding to support practica, post-doctoral positions and researchers to build the program’s foundation.

“One program cannot do everything in dismantling anti-Black racism, but it can definitely challenge white supremacy, and create spaces for Black health growth and wellness. I hope that other programs are going to pop up as a result of ours. It’s a part of a larger legacy of Black resistance and Black health.”

Community Climate Resilience Lab brings racial justice lens to climate change research

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 19 May 2021 19:30:43 +0000

Community Climate Resilience Lab brings racial justice lens to climate change research

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 05/19/2021 - 15:30

Cutline

Hurricane Katrina had a disproportionate impact on Black residents of New Orleans in 2005, foreshadowing the impact of climate-related disasters on racialized communities in the future (photo by Mark Wilson via Getty Images)

Topic

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Sustainability

A new ��Ƶ lab plans to marry lessons from climate change research and community-based resilience work with a racial justice lens.

The Community Climate Resilience Lab (CCRL) – which launches this fall – will bring together U of T academics, policy-makers and community actors to build community-led climate resilience from a racialized grassroots standpoint.

Imara Ajani Rolston

“It’s tragic that the bodies that built the industrial complex that ushered forth the climate crises will bear the brunt of climate change,” says Imara Ajani Rolston, an assistant professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health who is leading the lab within the school’s Healthier Cities & Community Hub.

For example, Canadian neighbouroods with a higher percentage of Black residents are 3.5 times more likely to be food insecure, recent statistics show. In Toronto, Black people also made up 20 per cent of the COVID-19 cases at the height of the pandemic despite accounting for just nine per cent of the city’s population.

“It’s important to see COVID-19 as a portal for what a climate crisis could look like,” says Rolston. “We only need to look at cities like New Orleans and [Hurricane] Katrina to know that through past experiences, prioritizing this kind of work as an institution in this city is important.”

While the CCRL brings together researchers, Rolston says he hopes to garner multi-sectoral input with an advisory circle that will hold the lab accountable and root the evolution of the lab’s vision in the community.

In the lab’s first phase, researchers plan to launch an environmental scan of racial justice-oriented resilience in North America and partner with not-for-profit and grassroots organizations.

Rolston says he first began to see the connections between health, climate and race years ago through his work advancing health justice in during the global HIV-AIDS epidemic. His doctoral studies focused on HIV prevention in South Africa, where he dug into the history of the global HIV-AIDS epidemic and apartheid. The creation of apartheid South Africa produced the pathways that created an environment for a global HIV-AIDS epidemic that affected historically Black marginalized communities.

“You can’t work in HIV without confronting the accelerating impact of climate change,” he says, adding that areas with the highest rates of HIV also had the highest rates of food insecurity and were least resilient to climate change-induced drought and flooding.

Rolston says he continues to see the story play out in his work with the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which supports HIV/AIDS programming across southern, eastern, and central Africa.

“Over the last five years, I’ve heard folks from country to country say over and over again that ‘the rains aren’t behaving the same,’” he says. “The droughts are getting longer and more unpredictable and the systems we built to make us resilient in the face of the pandemic are failing. I’m hearing this across southern and eastern Africa.”

The problem is not unique to the African region.

In 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation chose 100 cities, including Toronto, to take part in its first climate resilience strategy. The fund’s goal was to help cities around the world become more resilient to physical, social and economic shocks and stresses. As a neighbourhood resilience officer, Rolston advocated for equity to be at the forefront of its Toronto’s strategy and designed and implemented a process that prioritized engaging residents in Neighborhood Improvement Areas across Toronto.

He says the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to address the need for a more racially just and climate-resilient future for Toronto.

“There is no climate justice without racial justice,” Rolston says. “The lab is here to incubate, magnify, and catalyze new and impactful transformative climate resilience work with Black and racialized peoples and communities that should be centered in and lead the advancement of the climate justice agenda.”

Staying fit may decrease risk of death from COVID-19, study finds

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 14 May 2021 13:16:12 +0000

Staying fit may decrease risk of death from COVID-19, study finds

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 05/14/2021 - 09:16

Cutline

(Photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Topic

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Research & Innovation

A new study from researchers at the ��Ƶ's Dalla Lana School of Public Health suggests that improving your cardiorespiratory fitness level may help protect you from COVID-19.

The findings, published last week in the journal PLOS One, indicate that fit people have a reduced risk of dying from the disease.

“One of the really cool findings of this study is that anyone with an above low level of physical activity is better protected,” says Rebecca Christensen, a PhD student and lead author of the study. “Running once in a blue moon won’t protect you but if you are running regularly, you’re doing fine.”

The researchers examined a cohort of 2,690 adults from the UK Biobank Study and focused solely on the risk associated with death and the likelihood of catching the virus. They found no significant association between level of fitness and risk of infection. The study did not examine disease severity which would include hospitalization.

The data range was limited to ages 49 to 80, but the sample was large enough to look at COVID-specific death.

The team observed physical activity by percentile within ten-year age bands given the UK Biobank’s limited variables. The lowest 20th percentile was categorized as low fitness; the 40th to 80th percentile was moderate; and above the 80th percentile was above average.

Researchers observed that even low-to-moderate exercise seems to make a difference.

“Someone who just goes from doing no fitness to doing some fitness, could see appreciable benefits. And that’s why we pulled data based on age and activity-level thresholds,” Christensen says. “We want to see if you could just do something, will it have an impact? The answer is yes – as long as you’re doing something consistently.”

Physical activity declines with age but “if you’re fitter for people within your age group, are you going to have a benefit? The answer is still yes,” Christensen says.

A routine must include a cardio intense workout, one where you break a sweat or are breathing heavily says Christensen, but you don’t need to be a marathon runner. The greatest benefit is in moving from inactivity to some consistent amount of physical activity.

There are known cases of athletes catching COVID-19. Christensen says that the nature of their work increases the likelihood of catching COVID-19 as most are exercising in an environment with others in close settings. The severity of symptoms could be linked to the physical stress of the athlete’s intense workouts, she adds.

“People who exercise a lot can actually have a decrease in their immune system by over exercising,” she notes.

The World Health Organization recently doubled its recommended physical activity guideline. “We’ve got up to 300 minutes (about 5 hours) instead of 150 minutes (about 2 and a half hours) per week. So, we’re starting to see the importance of physical activity.”

Christensen advises, “the sooner you start, the better and then you’ll build up. You can make quite large gains when you go from doing nothing to doing anything.”

The researchers received no specific funding for the study.

Virtual 'spotting' could help keep drug users safe during COVID-19, U of T researchers say

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 13:29:09 +0000

Virtual 'spotting' could help keep drug users safe during COVID-19, U of T researchers say

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 04/26/2021 - 09:29

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Carol Strike, a professor at U of T's Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and Natalie Kaminski, a research assistant, are studying a remote supervised-consumption model known as "spotting."

Topic

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Drugs

Research & Innovation

A group of researchers at the ��Ƶ and the Canadian Association of People Who Use Drugs are studying a remote supervised-consumption model known as “spotting” to understand its benefits among people who use drugs during the pandemic.

The research team coined the term because the model involves a “spottee” consuming drugs in a safe location such as their home while a friend, family member or an acquaintance – the spotter –monitors them virtually.

“Before someone consumes a drug, they call their spotter on the phone who will be there on the call with them as they use,” says project lead Carol Strike, a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “The spotter stays on the line with the spottee for another five to 15 minutes to ensure they are safe or call for help if needed.”

So far, Strike says the researchers have found that spotters and spottees view the model as a way to be safe during the pandemic.

“If the spottee overdoses, the spotter will call a neighbour, friend or an ambulance to come and help,” says Natalie Kaminski, a research assistant on the project.

The plan for overdose response is created by both parties before the spottee consumes a substance.

While people who use drugs have spotted each other in person for a long time, the study is exploring how it is being used amid COVID-19, Kaminski says.

Research team members with lived experience of drug use recruited 30 participants from their personal networks in Nova Scotia and Ontario to take part in the study. The participants reported an increase in their safety and said they appreciated the privacy and stigma-free environment that spotting offered. Spotters, meantime, reported an improved connection with their community and a sense of accomplishment when working with spottees.

“Also, given COVID, they can consume at home instead of coming to the safe injection site,” says Strike.

The researchers say such tactics are needed amid reports of a growing number of fatal opioid overdoses in Canada during the pandemic.

However, the spotting model isn’t foolproof. For one thing, some spotters fear help may not arrive in time to revive spottees.

“There are also concerns about police intervention if 911 is called, especially among people who use drugs who are racialized,” says Strike, pointing to recent headlines about over-policing and criminalizing of racialized people.

The research team has produced recommendations to improve spotting programs – notably the development of guidelines for spotters and spottees, awareness programs for spotting services in the community and trauma support for spotters.

They are also presenting results to conferences and will submit their findings to an open-access journal. Strike and her team are poised to receive additional funding to create educational materials such as animated videos and tip sheets. The team hopes to do more research about app-based supervised consumption and the recently-launched National Overdose Prevention Service – a service funded to provide spotting 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“The primary goal of this project is to improve options for overdose prevention,” says Kaminski. “We’re hoping to make spotting safe for more people – in particular, those who don’t have access to supervised consumption sites.”

The study was made possible through funding from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

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Staying fit may decrease risk of death from COVID-19, study finds

Virtual 'spotting' could help keep drug users safe during COVID-19, U of T researchers say