On March 5, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research announced that 47 research projects related to coronavirus would receive a combined $27 million, including a project proposed by UFV’s own Cindy Jardine. Jardine, who is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Health and Community at UFV, has been granted $273,978 in funding to study the spread of COVID-19 and other viral illnesses among Canadians who “travel back to their countries of origin to visit friends and relatives.”
The project is one of many submitted to a rapid funding competition launched by the federal government on Feb. 10 for research projects related to COVID-19, as a part of Canada’s efforts to help fight the global pandemic. According to Jardine, the rapid speed at which the research was proposed and funded is highly unusual, and speaks to Canada’s ability to innovate.
“We had eight days to prepare a full proposal, with all of the bells and whistles they expect from normal proposals … then we had a decision within 10 days,” she said, noting that research projects like this usually take three to six months to get approval. “We’re still a little dumbfounded at the speed with which this happened.”
She said that the research will involve interviewing focus groups of travelers, specifically focusing on members of the Chinese and Punjabi communities — the two largest immigrant populations in the Fraser Valley. The study will focus on what Jardine called “health-risk communication,” looking into what kinds of pre-travel advice and preparation are available to individuals before they return to their countries of origin.
“We are looking specifically at travelers who are immigrants or the children of immigrants to the Fraser Valley,” Jardine said. “They tend to travel quite frequently back to their countries of origin, and they tend to live more like locals when they go back there; they live in houses with friends and relatives, so anything that everybody else is exposed to, they’re going to be exposed to.”
She said other aspects of the study will include speaking with family physicians in the Fraser Valley and Lower Mainland area about their experiences giving traveling advice to people, and a survey of all UFV students to find out about their travel patterns and what they do when they travel to keep themselves safe.? She expects that the research will be concluded within two years, and she aims to have all research data collected within four to eight months, with a survey coming out for UFV students at some point in the next two weeks.
Jardine said that although the research is being conducted locally, its findings will be broadly applicable to the rest of Canada and beyond. Researchers involved in the study will include UFV associate professors Martha Dow and Satwinder Bains and senior members of the B.C. provincial health system, as well as researchers from institutions in Manitoba, Australia, and New Zealand.
“We’ve got such a great, diverse population in the Fraser Valley that it is really a very representative microcosm for the rest of Canada,” she said.
Despite its focus on immigrant communities, Jardine stressed that her research is not intended to stigmatize anyone. “We’re not doing this with immigrant populations to in any way imply that they are at fault or to blame for what’s happening,” said Jardine. “They’re absolutely not. They’re just a specific group of travelers who, because they travel more frequently and under different circumstances, may be at higher risk.”
Image: Unsplash/Ousa Chea
