National study focuses on women living with HIV
Angela Kaida, an SFU professor of health sciences, is leading SFU in Canada’s cutting-edge research on the prevalence of HIV in women.
Without a doubt, the biological differences among men and women are vast, and include an increased susceptibility of women to HIV. This vulnerability is amplified by social and cultural factors such as poverty, marginalization, violence and gender inequalities.
Kaida is the BC lead of the Canadian HIV Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Cohort Study (CHIWOS), a research project with three other principal investigators around the country that focuses on women-centered health care to address these issues. SFU is one of three Canadian universities associated with the project, along with a team of investigators from across the country who are collaborating on the study.
Robert Hogg, a fellow SFU health sciences professor and director of the Epidemiology and Population Health programat the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, leads the connection of CHIWOS to the Canadian Observational Cohort (CANOC) study.
“The etymology of HIV in women has been changing over the last few years,” explained Kaida. “The aim of the study is to see how women-centered health care may a make a difference in the lives of women living with HIV. We’re really trying to meet women where they’re at.”
CHIWOS’ methodology focuses on community-based research in Ontario, Québec and British Columbia. The study is partnering with policy makers and HIV positive women from all social gradients across the country. The individuals who will profit from the study provides are part of the collection process, and that’s where the emphasis on community lies.
Already, interesting findings have come out of the BC portion of the study regarding the province’s Aboriginal population. In BC, one third of HIV-positive women are Aboriginal, a finding that is not reflected in Ontario or Québec.
“We’re taking a different approach to how we’re implementing the study. It’s from a community perspective from the beginning,” said Kaida. “We’re excited to see what kind of impact this has.”
She continued, “We’re very interested in how access to good quality health care can differ by social axis: are we seeing, what we would call, ‘more vulnerable’ women with lower income and lower literacy compared to higher income, higher literacy?”
The study requires participants to complete a questionnaire with a trained peer interviewer and to take part in a follow-up interview 18 months later. Study results are planned to be release in early 2015.
Doctoral graduand a friend to the fishes
Making waves on Canadian coastlines, doctoral graduand Brett Favaro has received a Liber Ero doctoral fellowship at the University of Victoria for his research on reducing bycatch in commercial fishing traps.
According to Favaro, a course on the biology of marine fish at at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre sensitized him to issues such as the damage that unrestricted commercial fishing activity can have on marine ecosystems.
After the University of Victoria was contacted by the BC prawn fishery, who hoped to investigate the issue of conservation, Favaro was presented with the opportunity to apply his knowledge to a real industry problem.
In his doctoral thesis, “Can fishing gear protect non-target fish?”, Brett examined the impacts of commercial fishing and evaluated how fisheries might reduce non-target catch, or bycatch. Building upon this, Brett designed and created a device that would keep threatened rockfish species out of the prawn fisheries’ traps.
“I didn’t appreciate how hard it would be,” laughed Favaro in an interview with The Peak. “Marine biology is really hard because to do the simplest thing you have to rely on a lot of technology.”
“The problem is these traps go down 100m, so that’s pretty deep. That’s too deep to scuba dive down, and it’s too expensive to send ROVs [Remotely Operated Vehicles] down to study them for any sort of extended period of time. So the first thing we had to come up with some way to look at what was going on in the traps.”
Favaro’s research culminated in the creation of a device that was designed to keep rockfish out while keeping the prawns in. However, scientific innovation for Favaro isn’t enough; it has to be a useable tool for the industry.
“You can’t just look at what it does to your bycatch rate . . . you have to introduce a technique that is also viable for catching fish. But you also have to look at what it does to other species. So it’s very, very complicated, but you have to look at whether its practical for use in the fishery.”
Favaro’s involvement with the industry has not stopped at technological innovation. Since writing his thesis, Favaro has written a letter to the editor of Science, challenging the federal government’s rationale for reducing fish habitat protection, and helped draw attention to the need for a made-in-BC Species at Risk Act in a provincial letter-writing campaign.
Yet, Favaro refuses to call himself a politically motivated scientist. “All that we were doing was doing science on essentially statements,” explained Favaro. “So instead of just accepting that the fisheries act was getting in the way of everyday activities, we treated that as a hypothesis and tried to find data or evidence [to support that].”
“I just felt it was a natural extension of science to take that and find data and test it, just like you would test any hypothesis.”
Away from BC’s coast, Favaro’s future research will take him to the Arctic, where he will conduct his post-doc on how to solve bycatch problems in uncharted waters.
