No measures were taken by Tam [or Trudeau] at Canadian Airports regarding full screening, and still arent!! Thousands of people from China [especially on Chinese flights] still are flooding into Canada each week, many given immediate visas.
Here is an up to date report [April, 20210] of the Government of Canada's blatant lie at a major airport, that all passengers coming into Canada are being/must be/ properly screened at the gates...and that the *Canadian border is closed, unless for *special reasons [so called, essential purposes].
Tam is also heavily involved with the rolling out of vaccines, the overseeing of Fentynal drug deaths..calling addiction a disease, the study of Lyme Disease and the GBT2Q Community in Canada
Met with
’s Michael Kwag at today’s announcement on new projects supporting #STBBI prevention among #GBT2Q men. #WorldAIDSDay
Replying to
Led by
, these projects will help prevent #STBBI and reduce the stigma too often experienced by #GBT2Q men in Canada when they seek access to health services. #WorldAIDSDay
From infectious disease to overdose: Canada’s top doc on the opioid crisis and the looming legalisation of cannabis
Public Health Agency of of Canada's Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood
Dr. Theresa Tam began her job as Canada’s top doctor in the middle of a public health crisis.
With the Zika scare largely gone, fentanyl overdoses have flashed red in the media and on her agency’s radar, although it’s not a department that was built on the idea of responding to drug overdose problems.
Tam has just finished her first year as Canada’s chief medical officer of health at Public Health Agency Canada (PHAC), an agency that itself is still relatively new by bureaucratic years. She’s Canada’s third chief medical officer.
PHAC was created after the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) crisis hit fifteen years ago, which was seen as a wake-up call for Canada to boost its ability to respond to emerging public health threats.
Tam, a paediatric infectious disease specialist and a field epidemiologist (essentially a disease outbreak detective), played a role in Canada’s response to that outbreak and gradually moved up the ranks at the agency.
“Once you’ve [caught] the public health population bug, it’s actually hard to go back into individual patient care,” she says in an interview with iPolitics.
“I switched full time into public health after SARS. I would now consider my patient as the population of Canada, which is an even more challenging and interesting patient in many ways than an individual child…so that really motivates me, because whatever I do can have an impact on a broader scale.”
Her background prepared her for her role at the agency, making decisions to prevent disease outbreaks. Until recently at least, she notes, the pandemics that public health officials worry about the most have largely been ones transmitted through human respiratory pathways.
Tam starts every day by taking stock of what’s going on around the world and around the country – monitoring influenza strains and outbreaks like that of Ebola recently in Congo – and determining if there is anything her team might need to respond to. She does lunch hour calls with Canada’s top provincial medical officers, discussing a range of issues, including ongoing work and next steps in monitoring Canada’s opioid crisis.
But while monitoring global infectious disease outbreaks and trying to keep those and other public health concerns at bay, her biggest challenge might be that she’s taken the helm as the country’s drug overdose rate has spiralled into the biggest drug crisis Canada has ever faced.
“That’s something that’s very unlike an infectious disease in many ways,” she said. “It brought in the complexity of managing a public health crisis in a non-infectious disease area.”
It’s not what she trained for, but marrying that past experience with a new challenge and finding ways to help address the problem fits with her mission to have as big an impact on Canadians’ collective health as she can.
The crisis has no easy quick fix, and it spans bureaucratic and federal-provincial jurisdictions. So her agency has had to adapt, and she’s spent a lot of time in a coordinating role.
Tam’s first project at the organization in the top role was working with the provinces on fixing gaps in proper monitoring – a system fragmented because that statistical data is collected asymmetrically in Canada, and not for the purpose of analyzing health problems.
While monitoring outbreaks is a daily ritual for her, Canada had started off behind the mark on overdose surveillance data, which is key to understanding the scope of the problem and designing policy responses. And after years of work by the department and others, it’s still not a totally clear picture from above.
Local data, Tam says, helps inform health officials how they should position their operations, and figure out where supervised consumption sites should be set up. Improving national data collection, though, has shown the crisis is “not uniform across the country,” indicating that different responses will be needed in different areas and for different populations.
About 3,987 Canadians died from opioid overdoses last year, according to PHAC, with the highest death rate being in B.C.
“Showing the [regional] differences is important right now to focus our attention but also to tell the rest of the country to be prepared: this epidemic may know no borders. Even if your rate is low right now, this could happen in your jurisdiction and we must all be prepared for it.”
That’s just looking at the top line figures, which are only a best guess.
Tam said the national numbers and deeper dives into data are “very important because you can’t change national policies without showing that there’s a huge number of deaths in a young population – mostly men.”
“What does that mean? That’s an extremely tragic incident that’s occurred that we haven’t seen in Canada in our collective experience in recent times.”
Tam also says she also wants to tackle reducing stigma toward drug users – something improving data can also help with.
“Canadians don’t actually understand where persons who use drugs are coming from in their background. Nobody chooses to have problematic substance use or substance use disorder,” she said. “And I think there’s too much of a separation in our current context between ‘them’ and ‘us’. I think the general population tends to think this is not going to happen to me, and this is happening somewhere else to a different population. Well, actually, it is all of us being impacted.”
Tam has a range of other priority issues on her plate, including the looming problem of superbugs resistant to antibiotics and antiviral medication (AMR), dealing with sky-high tuberculosis rates in the North.
She also says addressing problematic substance use in general is where she’ll be spending a lot of her energy.
Looking at the year ahead, another high-profile drug issue on he radar will be cannabis consumption. Canada legalizes recreational consumption of cannabis on October 17.
Tam says her agency has been positioning its role toward education and public awareness – things like educating health professionals, talking with boys and girls clubs, and getting examples to youth through schools.
Warning about the harms of cannabis might prove difficult, as the government legalizes a drug banned for the past hundred years, and governments have limited credibility in messaging about drug use.
“Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it doesn’t cause harm,” Tam said. “Getting the right facts out is really important in a non-stigmatizing and non-judgemental way.”
That work has so far included sending interactive exhibits through schools and translating dense guidelines into more useful, easy to understand information.
She says public education efforts on her agency’s end will ramp up after the substance is legal this fall.
“There will be more and more tools once it’s legalized,” she said. “Before it’s legal, you can’t actually go and tell people how to use it in a way that’s not harmful.”
But she said it will all boil down to “providing people with non-judgemental facts.”
Dr. Tam is going after and focusing on Canadian Youth now.
Join PHAC’s Dr. Howard Njoo,
,
and
for a National Youth Webinar on #COVID19 & mental health this Sunday at 2pm EST. Learn more about how you can participate and submit your questions here:
This is the video she had produced with Canadian Tax Dollars
Happy birthday is a classic, but let’s get creative! What’s your go-to Canadian #handwashingsong? Learn more about how you can help prevent the spread of #COVID19: ow.ly/ozt950zfhEn #WashYourLyrics
Are the 'Liberals' [Justin Trudeau] grooming her to become a Canadian hero one wonders?
I think so...especially aimed at Canadian youth.
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