Evidence of meeting #54 for Health in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was studies.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
Yes, Chair. I wonder if we can ask the clerk to perhaps find that article and send it out to the committee members.
Conservative
Adjunct Investigator, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, As an Individual
I believe it's actually on the university website as well.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
Meg Sears just said it might be available on the university website. Thanks.
Conservative
Liberal
Hedy Fry Liberal Vancouver Centre, BC
Dr. Sears gave us protocols of how we should be looking at good research, and so on, and how we should be evaluating it. I noticed that those are not the protocols used for evaluating research by Health Canada when they got their report. They used a totally different set of protocols.
Professor Blank, you are very intriguing, and I think everything you said makes a lot of sense. The body is an electric organism in many ways. The cells respond—
Liberal
Hedy Fry Liberal Vancouver Centre, BC
Exactly. It responds to positive ions and negative ions, of course, for the whole cellular structure just to work. We look at how people, when muscles are in pain, use electricity to stimulate the muscle. We know that if a heart suddenly stops, the first thing you do is to put paddles on it to stimulate it. The brain works on the same kind of electric stimuli. It's not at all a leap of faith to know that electromagnetic activity will impact the human body in many ways.
You pointed out that there were no biologists, which makes me really think, because one of the things we forget about when we talk about any kind of research is the very basic research. We always talk about applied research and commercially based research and research that will have an impact clinically, etc., but we forget about basic research. Basic research is at the heart of any kind of research.
Biologists are going to be extremely important, especially, as you said, when we are talking about DNA. We know there are lots of things that actually create very different chromosomal activity. We know that age is one, when we look at Down Syndrome in the old days. We look at so many other factors that influence it. So what you're saying makes a lot of sense to me.
I wanted to ask you and Dr. Sears something, because you both mentioned it. Just as basic research is at the core of good scientific research down the road, why is data collection not seen as being essential to any kind of epidemiology? Whether it's basic demographic epidemiology or clinical epidemiology, data collection is inherent. I was told that the government is not collecting a great deal of data to look at cause and effect. I think of the times when we used things without having knowledge and without having data collection and without looking before we leapt. Thalidomide comes to mind. Alcohol's effect on the fetus comes to mind. Nobody ever felt that any of those things could be a problem.
We know we're looking at the effects of environmental exposure now on people with asthma, etc. and at how that is causing huge problems. If we know not only that mutations are caused by environmental stress sources but also that this stress protein you talked about is triggered by exposure to environmental changes and radiation and so on, shouldn't we be collecting good data?
In other words, it's so simple to look at the number of gliomas, to look at all kinds of brain cancers, breast cancers, etc., and to see that there are actually clusters of them. If there are clusters in certain areas, we could figure that out. We figure out a lot of things eventually, long after they happen. I just think the time has now come, with all of the knowledge and the information we have, for us to be collecting good data, looking at epidemiology in a different way, and looking at prevention.
You're absolutely right about the fetus. Pregnant women should be in a different category. We need to be able to look at protecting people. It's too late 15 years after a child has been exposed to cellphone activities or Wi-Fi, etc. at a very young age for us to say, “Oh, Lord. We didn't know that. We should have done something about it”, and then to start really doing something about it. I would think we'd have enough history to tell us about cause and effect over the years and about the way cells work and about how they respond to various things.
Why is it that we heard from Health Canada that data collection, whether clinical or epidemiological, is provincial jurisdiction? That's extremely interesting, given that we're now looking at epidemiology as an international issue. We're thinking that it has to be provincial in this country. Why can it not be federal? Why can't we get that information and look at whether there are other factors, and not simply electromagnetic fields? Why can't we look at whether in certain parts of Canada electromagnetic fields are enhanced by certain other things that occur in those parts of Canada? Who knows what they are?
I just want to hear you talk about data. I want us to get this idea that we must be collecting good data to give us evidence to link things clinically with new diseases, to look at frequency, and all of those things. Can you talk to me about data? I just want some more information, because I really feel that this is at the heart of what we're not doing in this country.
Adjunct Investigator, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, As an Individual
We used to do a better job of it.
I have taught a little bit of epidemiology, and one of my favourite things to do at one point was to tell people to go to NRCan's atlas, the Public Health Agency of Canada's website, and there are a few other sites. They used to have a really good website for toxic sites in Canada, through the Government of Canada. All of those have been severely degraded. The atlas is gone.
The data collection for cancers is usually done by the Canadian Cancer Society and StatsCan, but it's very, very crude data that they're bringing together. For instance, you can find data since 1992 on brain tumours and central nervous system, but you can't find glioma or something like that. Hardell could do his studies because in Sweden they were collecting very specific data, and they've been collecting it for ages.
Even though we are now starting up some kind of brain tumour registry, we won't have that data from 1990 to detect a change, until we've had time for a change to happen, so we'll be kind of mid-stream. Why that is happening, I don't know. We need a lot more evidence.
One other concern with radio frequencies is that they affect membranes. Environmental contaminants like lead, or other things that go through membranes and have their toxic effects, may be magnified in the presence of the radio frequencies that are compromising the integrity of the cell membrane. That's a concern that's been brought forward repeatedly, and it's an open research question. There is some preliminary evidence in children that that actually is happening with lead. But, once again, it's not well established; that's one study.
However, we certainly do need to be collecting environmental data, the data in schools, and we need to have much, much better public health data, not only for cancers, but for other conditions as well. That quality has gone way downhill in the last five years.
Prof. Martin Blank
If you collect data, very often it's just an assembly of numbers. If you have a hypothesis, then you can generate something from the numbers.
There was the case of Sam Milham, who was an epidemiologist from the state of Washington. He had the idea that there was a link between the incidence of leukemia in children and electrification. Electrification didn't occur in the United States at the same time; the north and east had it long before the south and west.
He went to different places and started collecting data on the incidence of leukemia, and lo and behold, he found that when electricity was introduced, within a few years there was a jump in leukemia. It correlated with the introduction of electricity. If you look at his data, you see there's a bump in there, and that was the origin of the linking of ELF with leukemia. He knew what he was looking for, and luckily the incidence of leukemia had somehow been collected.
You have to find something that will have the kinds of numbers you want; otherwise, you will just have file cabinets full of numbers.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ben Lobb
Thank you very much.
We ran into overtime this afternoon. It was a good meeting.
The meeting is adjourned.