Mobile supervised consumption services in Rural British Columbia: lessons learned.

Background: In 2016, a public health emergency was declared in British Columbia due to an unprecedented number of illicit drug overdose deaths. Injection drug use was implicated in approximately one third of overdose deaths. An innovative delivery model using mobile supervised consumption services (SCS) was piloted in a rural health authority in BC with the goals of preventing overdose deaths, reducing public drug use, and connecting clients to health services.

Drug checking at an electronic dance music festival during the public health overdose emergency in British Columbia.

Setting: Shambhala is a 5-day electronic dance music (EDM) festival held in rural British Columbia that annually hosts between 15,000 and 18,000 people on a 500-acre ranch. The AIDS Network Outreach & Support Society (ANKORS) has provided harm reduction services throughout the duration of the festival since 2003, including point-of-care drug checking, which allows real-time testing of illicit substances to assess their composition. Drug checking results are provided directly to clients and displayed in aggregate on a screen for all attendees to see.

Expanding harm reduction to include fentanyl urine testing: results from a pilot in rural British Columbia.

Background: Harm reduction has been at the forefront of the response to the opioid overdose public health emergency in British Columbia (BC). The unprecedented number of opioid overdose deaths in the province calls for an expansion of harm reduction services. The purpose of this study was to determine the acceptability of a fentanyl urine drug test among people who use drugs (PWUD) and explore whether testing introduced any changes in participants' attitudes and behaviors towards their drug use.

Enhancing access to cervical and colorectal cancer screening for women in rural and remote northern Alberta: a pilot study.

Background: Women in rural and remote northern Alberta access breast cancer screening through a mobile mammogram program (Screen Test). The Enhanced Access to Cervical and Colorectal Cancer Screening (EACS) project was a 2-year pilot that aimed to integrate cervical and colorectal cancer screening with the Screen Test program. This study compares cervical and colorectal cancer screening uptake among women screened through the pilot (Screen Test-EACS) versus Screen Test.

Screening History in 313 Cases of Invasive Cancer: A Retrospective Review of Cervical Cancer Screening in Alberta, Canada.

Objective: To examine the screening history of invasive cervical cancer (ICC) cases in Alberta, Canada to identify areas for improvement of the population-based cervical cancer screening program.

Methods: Retrospective review of ICC cases diagnosed in 2 cities in Alberta between 2007 and 2012. Cancer morphology and staging were elicited from the Alberta Cancer Registry; cancer screening history and Pap test results were extracted from the Provincial Cervical Cancer Screening database.

Integrated Cancer Screening Performance Indicators: A Systematic Review.

Cancer screening guidelines recommend that women over 50 years regularly be screened for breast, cervical and colorectal cancers. Population-based screening programs use performance indicators to monitor uptake for each type of cancer screening, but integrated measures of adherence across multiple screenings are rarely reported. Integrated measures of adherence that combine the three cancers cannot be inferred from measures of screening uptake of each cancer alone; nevertheless, they can help discern the proportion of women who, having received one or two types of screening, may be more amenable to receiving one additional screen, compared to those who haven't had any screening and may experience barriers to access screening such as distance, language, and so on.

Childhood vision screening in Canada: public health evidence and practice.

Objectives: Best practice guidelines recommend vision testing in children 3 to 5 years of age for the prevention of amblyopia; however, universal vision screening is controversial. In Canada, amblyopia screening can be the responsibility of physicians, optometrists, and/or Public Health. We review the evidence underlying preschool vision screening for amblyopia using an Evidence-based Public Health (EBPH) approach, and consider implications for the Public Health provision of universal screening programs for amblyopia in Canadian jurisdictions in light of present practices.

Inner retina remodeling in a mouse model of stargardt-like macular dystrophy (STGD3).

Purpose. To investigate the impact of progressive age-related photoreceptor degeneration on retinal integrity in Stargardt-like macular dystrophy (STGD3). Methods.

Incomplete penetrance and phenotypic variability characterize Gdf6-attributable oculo-skeletal phenotypes.

Proteins of the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) family are known to have a role in ocular and skeletal development; however, because of their widespread expression and functional redundancy, less progress has been made identifying the roles of individual BMPs in human disease. We identified seven heterozygous mutations in growth differentiation factor 6 (GDF6), a member of the BMP family, in patients with both ocular and vertebral anomalies, characterized their effects with a SOX9-reporter assay and western analysis, and demonstrated comparable phenotypes in model organisms with reduced Gdf6 function. We observed a spectrum of ocular and skeletal anomalies in morphant zebrafish, the latter encompassing defective tail formation and altered expression of somite markers noggin1 and noggin2.

The electroretinogram (ERG) of a diurnal cone-rich laboratory rodent, the Nile grass rat (Arvicanthis niloticus).

The most widespread models to study blindness, rats and mice, have retinas containing less than 3% cones. The diurnal rodent Arvicanthis niloticus retina has around 35% cones. Using ERG recordings, we studied retina function in this species.

Retinal anatomy and visual performance in a diurnal cone-rich laboratory rodent, the Nile grass rat (Arvicanthis niloticus).

Unlike laboratory rats and mice, muridae of the Arvicanthis family (A. ansorgei and A. niloticus) are adapted to functioning best in daylight.

Modified Ca(v)1.4 expression in the Cacna1f(nob2) mouse due to alternative splicing of an ETn inserted in exon 2.

The Cacna1f(nob2) mouse is reported to be a naturally occurring null mutation for the Ca(v)1.4 calcium channel gene and the phenotype of this mouse is not identical to that of the targeted gene knockout model. We found two mRNA species in the Cacna1f(nob2) mouse: approximately 90% of the mRNA represents a transcript with an in-frame stop codon within exon 2 of CACNA1F, while approximately 10% of the mRNA represents a transcript in which alternative splicing within the ETn element has removed the stop codon.

Blindness caused by deficiency in AE3 chloride/bicarbonate exchanger.

Background: Vision is initiated by phototransduction in the outer retina by photoreceptors, whose high metabolic rate generates large CO2 loads. Inner retina cells then process the visual signal and CO2. The anion exchanger 3 gene (AE3/Slc4a3) encodes full-length AE3 (AE3fl) and cardiac AE3 (AE3c) isoforms, catalyzing plasma membrane Cl-/HCO3- exchange in Müller (AE3fl) and horizontal (AE3c) cells.