Knowledge, attitudes and behaviours concerning cancer screening in Canada.

The Advisory Committee on Cancer Control funded a one-day workshop to discuss the surveillance of knowledge, attitudes/beliefs and behaviours concerning early cancer detection in Canada. Participants considered the need for such national surveillance and related methodological issues. Some exploratory work has been conducted in this regard.

Estimating the economic costs of the abuse of tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs: a review of methodologies and Canadian data sources.

The study of economic costs of substance abuse, namely, abuse of tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs, can provide important information for setting good public health policies. This review paper provides a list of previous cost studies of substance abuse, compares the cost categories considered by various methodologies and describes an inventory of data sources for obtaining relevant information for cost studies. Investigators will find this paper useful as an introduction to the literature in this area, for designing a list of cost categories to consider in a particular study and for identifying relevant data sources.

Uses and limitations of routine hospital admission/separation records for perinatal surveillance.

This study examined the quality of data for delivering mothers and their newborns (April 1, 1984 to March 31, 1995) recorded by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). The number of illogical and out-of-range values in the CIHI data were quite few; the occurrence of maternal and infant diseases estimated from CIHI data was quite similar to that in the literature; and major medical/obstetric complications recorded in CIHI were, in general, good predictors of adverse pregnancy outcomes. The authors conclude that CIHI data contain some of the information pertinent to perinatal surveillance that may be used to monitor maternal and infant health and to assess intrapartum care and hospital resource utilization.

Evolution of the hemagglutinin gene of influenza B virus was driven by both positive and negative selection pressures.

Nucleotide sequences of the hemagglutinin (HA) gene of twelve influenza B strains and their deduced amino acid sequences were extracted from the GenBank and compared to those of early isolates. Separate analyses of nonsynonymous and synonymous substitutions for the HA1 and HA2 regions individually indicate that the percentage of nonsynonymous substitutions in the HA1 ranges from 44.4-56.

Fact sheet: major causes of death in Canada, 1993-1995.

Mortality is one of many summary indicators of disease burden. The following tables and graphs display the relative contributions and geographic variability of major conditions causing mortality in Canada. Rates are age-standardized to permit comparison of the relative impact of different conditions in populations with differing age structures.

Canadian health surveys, 1950 1997.

This paper provides a brief history of Canadian health surveys and a review of health or health-related surveys from the first national household survey in 1950/51 to the present time. Surveys have evolved from collecting information on health care utilization, health status and some risk behaviours to a wider range of health determinants following the 1974 Lalonde report. In addition to the occasional cross-sectional surveys, there are periodic surveys, longitudinal surveys, school-based surveys and surveys based on subgroups in the population or specific topic areas.

The epidemiology of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Canada: a review of mortality data.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), and particularly its transmissibility through blood and blood products, has become a focus of concern in Canada. The recent identification of new variant CJD led to a review of the Canadian mortality database to identify any clustering of CJD by age, sex, or geographic location.

Vaccination coverage of 2-year-old children and immunization practices--Canada, 1994.

The purpose of the study was to assess vaccination coverage of 2-year-olds and estimate immunization practices in Canada using a postal survey with a panel of 862 households. RIM weighting was used to provide national estimates. 95% CIs were calculated using the binomial method.

Characterization of cytotoxic, hemolytic Aeromonas caviae clinical isolates and their identification by determining presence of a unique hemolysin gene.

Aeromonas caviae has recently been recognized as an important enteropathogen and its hemolysin is purported to be one of the virulence factors, In this study, a total of 80 clinical isolates of Aeromonas spp. were investigated by PCR with synthetic oligonucleotides targeting a cloned hemolysin-encoding sequence from an A. caviae isolate of clinical origin.

Importance of Q fever in community acquired pneumonia.

Coxiella burnetii appears to be endemic in animals in the Mauricie region of Quebec, and causes some human cases of Q fever annually. Unlike in other rural areas, patients in this study experienced few respiratory symptoms. To determine whether C burnetii pneumonia is underdiagnosed, adults admitted to hospital for community acquired pneumonia were included in a one-year serological study.

Recording, notification, compilation, and classification of statistics of occupational accidents and diseases: the Thai experience.

An International Labour Organization (ILO) project was conducted in July and August 1995 in Thailand to assist with the development of an information system on occupational accidents and diseases for the Workmen's Compensation Fund (WCF). The WCF provides cash benefits and medical care to insured workers who suffer employment injuries. The project included literature research based on the facilities of the ILO in Bangkok, and those of the Thai government, and a thorough review of the ILO Code of Practice (the Code) on recording and notification of occupational accidents and diseases, and of other international recommendations on statistics of occupational accidents and diseases.

Vero cytotoxigenic Escherichia coli infection in dairy farm families.

Fecal samples from 335 dairy farm residents and 1458 cattle on 80 farms were tested for Vero cytotoxin (VT)-producing Escherichia coli (VTEC). Residents were also tested for antibodies to VT1 and O157 lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Residents and cattle on farms with VTEC-positive persons or E.

Recent trends in Canadian infant mortality rates: effect of changes in registration of live newborns weighing less than 500 g.

Objective: To ascertain whether the increase in the crude infant mortality rate in Canada in 1993 was due to a recent increase in the registration of newborns weighing less than 500 g as live births.

Design: Ecological study, with Poisson regression analysis.

Setting: Canada.

Growing Concerns and Recent Outbreaks Involving Non-O157:H7 Serotypes of Verotoxigenic Escherichia coli.

Verocytotoxin-producing E. coli (VTEC) of serotype O157:H7 have been shown to be important agents of foodborne disease in humans worldwide. While the majority of research effort has been targeted on this serotype it is becoming more evident that other serotypes of VTEC can also be associated with human disease.

Chlamydiae as pathogens: new species and new issues.

The recognition of genital chlamydial infection as an important public health problem was made first by the recognition of its role in acute clinical syndromes, as well as in serious reproductive and ocular complications, and secondly by our awareness of its prevalence when diagnostic tests became widely accessible. The recent availability of effective single dose oral antimicrobial therapy and sensitive molecular amplification tests that allow the use of noninvasive specimens for diagnosis and screening is expected to have a major impact in reducing the prevalence of disease in the next decade. Clinical manifestations associated with Chlamydia pneumoniae infection continue to emerge beyond respiratory illness.

Identification of IS1356, a new insertion sequence, and its association with IS402 in epidemic strains of Burkholderia cepacia infecting cystic fibrosis patients.

Burkholderia cepacia is now recognized as an important opportunistic pathogen in cystic fibrosis (CF) and other compromised patients. Epidemicity among CF patients has been attributed to at least one particularly infectious strain (strain ET12), and both genetic evidence and anecdotal evidence suggest that this strain, currently endemic in Ontario, and those causing an epidemic in the United Kingdom, are indeed the same. Our study was conducted to determine whether there was any association between the presence of various insertion sequence (IS) elements, the cable pilin subunit gene (cblA), electrophoretic type (ET), and ribotype (RT) in a collection of 97 clinical and 2 environmental isolates of B.

Evaluation of ribotyping as epidemiologic tool for typing Escherichia coli serogroup O157 isolates.

A total of 121 representative Escherichia coli O157:H7 and O157:NM (nonmotile) isolates were characterized by ribotype, phage type, verotoxin genotype, and genomic fingerprints generated by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis. Ribotyping was not able to discriminate between O157:H7 isolates, and phage typing and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis were the most valuable and discriminatory techniques.