Latest news with #UBC
CBC
a day ago
- Health
- CBC
Almost 50% more IUDs, implants dispensed after B.C. made birth control free: study
A new study out of UBC is looking at the use of contraception in B.C. after the province began covering the cost of prescription birth control in 2023. It shows a jump in birth control prescriptions overall. But it also reveals that users opted for longer-lasting options that cost more up front. The study's lead author, Laura Schummers, an assistant professor at UBC in the faculty of pharmaceutical sciences, spoke to CBC News about her research.
CBC
a day ago
- Health
- CBC
New study finds almost 50% more IUDs, implants dispensed after B.C. made birth control free
Social Sharing More people started using IUDs and implants after B.C. made almost all forms of prescription birth control free, according to a new UBC research study. The study, led by Dr. Laura Schummers, found a 49 per cent jump in the number of "long-acting reversible contraceptives" (LARC) dispensed per month, 15 months after B.C.'s free contraception program began in April 2023. "This really tells us that there was a substantial cost-related barrier to using contraception as a whole," said Schummers, assistant professor at the University of B.C. in the faculty of pharmaceutical sciences. That "LARC" category — the most effective type of birth control — includes the IUD (intrauterine device), which is placed directly into the uterus, and the subdermal arm implant, placed under the skin in the upper arm. The implant lasts for three years, while the IUD can last for up to 12 years. The study found an additional 11,375 people using those methods within 15 months of the policy taking effect. Schummers said it shows that people across age groups and demographics will prefer more effective contraceptive methods when costs are removed. An IUD can cost between $350 and $450 in Canada, and the upfront cost can be a barrier, according to Schummers. Schummers said B.C.'s "landmark" policy has influenced discussions around free prescription medications in Canada. She noted Manitoba also started a free contraception program in October 2024. "Nearly a 50 per cent increase ... in the context of evaluating policy changes is huge," Schummers said. "This is not a few people at the margins whose insurance coverage wasn't quite right. This is telling us that there's a broad need for this kind of broad coverage, not just a limited sort of Band-Aid to maybe change an income threshold for coverage availability." The research study used two data sources, including a national database to look at prescriptions across B.C. for LARC and all contraception, as well as consider that data against a control group including all the other Canadian provinces that didn't make contraception free. Dr. Renée Hall, medical director of Willow Reproductive Health Centre in Vancouver, said her experience at the clinic tracks with the study's findings. "There has been a significant increase since universal contraceptives started," she said. The clinic has actually created a new phone line specifically for people calling in for long-acting reversible contraceptives like the IUD and implant. Hall said that the universal contraception program has given patients the chance to find the best contraceptive for them. "If the IUD didn't work out … they could easily switch to another until they found the one that could work," she said, "whereas that's really difficult to do if you have to pay the $400 for your first IUD and then another $200 for the next one." Hall said that she recommends more training for IUD insertion, which she said is "still a little bit lacking in our usual medical programs." Hall said the study shows the public wants access to effective, long-acting birth control.
CBC
a day ago
- General
- CBC
Search for B.C.'s Best Symbol: Animal Semifinals
If you were to have asked settler British Columbians what their favourite symbol of this area was 100 years ago, few would have said orcas. "They were seen as an animal that was quite terrifying and something to be feared," said Andrew Trites, director of the University of B.C.'s Marine Mammal Research Unit. "Even the name they were given, killer whales, that should be a red flag right there," he said. Because of some dangerous encounters with humans and the fact that whales and humans were often viewed to be in competition for salmon, headlines like "Killer Whale Spreads Fear" and "Criminals Of Ocean" were seen in B.C. newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s. At one point, there was the idea of using machine guns near Seymour Narrows to shoot them. But according to historian Jason Colby, public perception of orcas among settlers changed rather dramatically in the 1960s, as they began to be put in captivity and studied. "Even though that practice is rightly criticized these days, it was really the spark that transformed our relationship with them," he said. "When we brought them into our urban spaces and started experiencing them as individuals … it was a powerful factor in shifting the way people not just thought about orcas, but how they thought about how we treat all wildlife in the region." In that sense, according to Colby, the orca became a proxy for B.C.'s burgeoning environmental movement — including the campaign to stop holding them in captivity — and with that became a symbol of something far greater than its own species. Or put another way, symbols often become powerful not because of what they do, but how the culture around them changes. "The shifting economic value or environmental values, the shifting priorities about how we interact with the local landscape and seascape," said Colby. "I think it's a pretty powerful symbol of how we changed in terms of our values and priorities, and it remains so today." Yet despite the shift among settler attitudes over the past 100 years, many coastal First Nations have deep, longstanding and sacred relationships with orcas. According to Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations' teachings, orcas are the guardians of the sea, and for the Tsleil-Waututh people, the whales are a source of spiritual power and teachings. In 2018, when an orca mother carried her dead calf through the Salish Sea for 17 days, the Tsleil-Waututh Nation called it a "direct communication" from the whales to remind them of their responsibilities to the lands, waters and beings. From 64 symbols to just 16 left While the orca may be a powerful symbol, can B.C.'s official bird, the mighty Steller's jay, produce a big upset? The Search for B.C.'s Best Symbol has reached its third round, and with it, the number of daily matchups this week goes down to two. The winners will advance to the quarterfinals, which begin next week. Voting closes at 10 p.m. PT — may the best symbols advance!
National Observer
2 days ago
- Business
- National Observer
How a young leader is building the circular economy
These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity. Abhiudai Mishra (Abhi) is growing the circular economy. This 24 year old Vancouverite is the co-founder and operations director of Mosa Technologies which, in its first two years, has transformed more than 40,000 glass bottles into beautifully upcycled glasses, platters and candles. Mosa also offers workshops for students of all ages to learn about and participate in the circular economy, where they themselves do the upcycling. Abhi is a Starfish Canada 2025 Top 25 Environmentalist Under 25 award winner. Tell us about your project My co-founder Prishita Agarwal and I believe one of the best ways to learn about the circular economy is to engage in it directly. Once you work in the industry, purchase a beautiful affordable upcycled product or make one yourself, you know without a doubt that sustainability can be affordable, beautiful and easy and popular. Our team of ten employees have decent work supplying more than 60 retail stores across Canada. We have engaged 800 students from kindergarten to university in learning about circularity as they contribute to it. We collect bottles and glass fragments from restaurants, bars and landfills. We work with designers and use technology adapted from ceramic cutting to make new things from old. How did you get into this work? I was a student at UBC's Sauder School of Business and had a house party. As I was cleaning up my apartment one of the empty bottles broke. It frustrated me that recycling glass shards is awkward. Prishita and I researched how to do that and encountered the idea of transforming the economy so nothing is wasted and everything is repurposed. We decided to explore how to use waste glass. We bought a small glass cutter online and began experimenting. The first product took us weeks of work but eventually we had enough for a booth at a UBC student event. We sold out in 3 hours! Now just 2 years later we have hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue and are finding new markets every day. Abhi Mishra, co-founder of Mosa Technologies, has over the past two years played a key role in diverting more than 40,000 glass bottles from waste bins, instead converting them into beautifully upcycled glasses, platters and candles. What makes it hard? We have a lot of success placing our products with small independent stores like Cultured Coast in Nanaimo, Caribou Gifts in Toronto and Makers Vancouver but it has proved challenging to persuade large retailers to carry them. We are working to remind them it is good for their brand to carry beautiful sustainable products that reach consumers with their meaning. What keeps you awake at night? Is it going to be enough? Is there more we could be doing to spread these concepts more rapidly? What gives you hope? Last week two young women approached me saying they had been inspired by a talk I gave recently and asked me to mentor them with their idea about reducing fast fashion. This reminded me we never know when we will have impact. How did the way you were raised affect you? My family has been one of the noble families in the Indian city of Udaipur for 500 years. Udaiper is sometimes called the Venice of India with canals, rivers and lakes and I was raised to understand stewarding this beautiful place is a responsibility. My Grade One teacher explained carpooling was a way to cut air pollution and I went door knocking to our neighbours with the idea. My parents viewed this as a natural response to new information. I have always known I would work to protect the people and places we love. That houseparty showed me my current path. What would you like to say to other young people? Start. Don't wait for all the stars to align or until you know everything. That will never happen anyway and you will have lost valuable time and experience. Don't wait for funding either. We didn't have any. We just got going. Find a friend or colleague or mentor and just start. What about older readers? Look around you for people who are working to protect our land and water and offer your experience and money if you can. We don't have time to make the same mistakes you made so help us avoid them.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Climate
- Yahoo
Clearcutting tied to 18-fold increase in flood risk: UBC study
A new study from the University of British Columbia suggests that clearcut logging can make catastrophic floods up to 18 times more frequent. The study, published in the Journal of Hydrology, analyzed long-term data from one of the world's longest-running forest research sites in North Carolina, the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory. "We had a good opportunity to test out the effect of the physical characteristics of the landscape on the relationship between logging practices and flooding," Younes Alila, a UBC hydrologist and senior author of the study, told CBC News. Researchers compared two neighbouring watersheds, one facing north, the other south, that were both clear-cut in the late 1950s. They found that clear-cutting in the north-facing watershed, which receives less sunlight and retains more moisture, had a dramatic effect on flood behaviour."The north-facing watershed was super sensitive," Alila said. In that watershed, average flood sizes increased by nearly 50 per cent, while the largest floods were 105 per cent bigger than they were before logging. "Different sides of the mountains will respond differently to logging," Alila explained. He says the north side receives less sunlight, which keeps the soil wetter year-round. When storms arrive, the ground is already moist and can't absorb much water, causing more rain to run off into streams and rivers, resulting in larger floods. In contrast, the south-facing watershed, which loses more moisture due to greater sunlight exposure, saw almost no change in flooding after clear-cutting. WATCH | A clearcut the size of a city in B.C.'s Interior: Alila called the difference "a breakthrough finding," highlighting how landscape factors like the direction a slope faces can reshape a watershed's flood regime. "The point we are trying to make is that we can use the way Mother Nature designed the landscape … to better manage the forest in ways that minimize the risk to hydrology and the risk of floods." Precautionary approach In addition to slope orientation, the hydrology professor emphasized that other landscape characteristics, including whether the terrain is flat or mountainous, contains lakes, wetlands or floodplains, all influence how a watershed responds to logging. "You should not be logging in one part of a watershed without accounting for what's happening elsewhere in the same drainage basin," he said. "Water flows from highlands to lowlands so we need cumulative impact studies before moving ahead with forest development." Alila says the current regulations in B.C. don't require companies to conduct proper watershed-level impact assessments before logging. Researchers say the study's findings are directly relevant to the province, where clear-cut logging remains common and terrain features mirror those of the test site. "Clear-cut logging in B.C. has increased the downstream flood risk rather dramatically," Alila added. He points to the devastating 2018 floods in Grand Forks, B.C. as an example, saying clear-cutting in the Kettle River watershed played a major role. Most flood models that predict the behaviour of floodwaters, assume a simple, predictable relationship between logging and flooding, the UBC professor says. For example, cutting down X per cent of trees, will likely result in Y per cent more water runoff. But the study says after clear-cutting, the risk of extreme and unpredictable floods increases in ways that these basic models can't capture. "This experimental evidence validates our longstanding call for better analysis methods," said Alila. "When we apply proper probabilistic tools to long-term data, we find much stronger and more variable impacts than older models suggest." Jens Wieting, senior policy and science advisor with Sierra Club B.C., said the study underscores the need to reform forestry practices to respond to climate risks. "This study is really demonstrating that we need a precautionary approach," said Wieting. "Clear-cutting can make climate change impacts worse." He said moving away from clear-cutting and toward selective logging — a practice where only certain trees are harvested, leaving the rest of the forest intact — could help reduce flood risk, restore degraded landscapes, and save money in the long run by avoiding climate disaster costs. Province acknowledges research In a statement to CBC News, the B.C. Ministry of Forests said it "appreciates the research being done at UBC" and emphasized that the province continues to invest in water and forest management. "Currently, through allowable cut determinations, the Chief Forester places limits on the rate of cut in each watershed to help provide balance to the many values our forested landscapes provide, including reducing flood risks," the statement reads. The ministry says it's also moving beyond traditional modelling to better understand how changes to forests, water, and climate affect long-term sustainability. That includes promoting practices like selective thinning, fuel management and forest restoration. The province has also introduced Forest Landscape Planning (FLP), which it describes as one of the most effective tools for reducing flood risk at a broader scale. Still, Alila says implementation of old-growth deferrals and other reforms from the province have been slow. "We continue old-growth logging…we've been aggressively clearcut logging for the last many decades so we only have a bit left."
