Please remember that The QEII and IWK Foundations invite you to join them for Bust a Move for Breast Health on January 30, 2010 – a very special fitness extravaganza guaranteed to challenge the body and uplift the spirit! Visit www.bustamove.ca to learn more, to register, or to sponsor a participant! PLUS A VIDEO INTERVIEW: ‘We need your toenails’. That is the request of Dr. Louise Parker whom the QEII Foundation announced in 2007 as the inaugural Canadian Cancer Society Nova Scotia Division Chair in Population Cancer Research. Dr. Parker is the principal investigator in the Atlantic Path project. The QEII Foundation announced this week $200,000 in new funding to be directed towards the ground-breaking Atlantic Path cancer research project. It’s currently underway across the region studying genetic, lifestyle and environmental contributors to cancer. The funds are a welcome boost for a project that promises to impact the health of Atlantic Canadians for generations to come.
Dr Parker is originally from Newcastle in UK and has been studying cancer for many years. Dr Parker sees the data gathering currently underway as an initiative that will pay dividends for future Atlantic Canadians. “This is for the health of our children and grandchildren,” Dr Parker also says. “It’s taking an in depth look at a lot of things we’ve never really considered before as determinants of population cancer.” One such possible determinant, the arsenic that naturally occurs in some well water, is being looked at in a sub-study of Path via study participants’ toenail clippings.
“In Nova Scotia, about 45% of us get our drinking water from wells,” said Dr. Parker. “We need to know the effect that arsenic and other heavy metals is having on our cancer rates.” Atlantic Canadians have amongst the country’s highest rates in many types of cancer, and Dr. Parker hopes the Atlantic Path project will help shed some light on why, and what we can do to change that. First, she needs as many study participants aged 35 – 69 as possible. To find out more about the Atlantic Path project, visit their website at www.atlanticpath.ca or call 494-7284 in the Halifax area and 1-877-285-7284 toll-free from outside Halifax.
