During the pre-Salk era, paralytic poliomyelitis was one of the most feared diseases of twentieth-century North America. This perception, held most strongly by the middle class-- polio's principal target--shaped a unique Canadian response to it based on comprehensive, standardized, and unconditional programs of "state medicine" at the provincial level. Of Canada's four major waves of provincial...

Reducing all preventable lead exposures in children should be a public health priority given that blood lead levels in children that were once considered "safe" have since been associated with important neuro-developmental deficits. Limited Canadian data indicate that school drinking water can be an important component of children's overall exposure to lead. Outside of Ontario, however, Canadia...

Canadian health system managers are increasingly concerned about the number of hospital in-patients who do not need acute care services (Ontario Association for Community Care Access Centres et al. 2006; Yassi et al. 2008). These patients are widely known as "ALC patients" because they are awaiting an alternative level of care in a more appropriate setting. ALC days in hospitals is a systems is...

campaign contributions from the tobacco industry can influence legislators’ tobaccorelated policy decisions. To our knowledge, there have been no published accounts of tobacco industry contributions to Canadian legislators. As part of a broader study examining Canadian legislators’ attitudes toward tobacco control policies and possible factors that influence those attitudes, we have documented ...

The distribution and biology of the beaver beetle, Platypsyllus castoris Ritsema, are summarized for North America. In light of the fact that the beetle uses two beaver species as hosts which have seemingly been separated for some five million years on two continents, it is asked if the Nearctic and Palearctic beetle populations are really the same species. 86 Volume 20, No. 1-2, March-June, 20...

OBJECTIVE To describe Canadian family physicians' prescribing practices with regard to Alzheimer disease (AD). DESIGN Cross-sectional survey administered by facsimile. SETTING Four regions in Canada (British Columbia, the Prairie Provinces, Ontario, and the Atlantic Provinces). PARTICIPANTS A stratified random sample of 1000 Canadian family physicians (250 per region) chosen from the Cana...