Statistics Canada planning to collect blood, urine samples from Canadians

(Ottawa)  The next time a Statistics Canada pollster knocks at the door he
may be out for blood. The federal agency plans to collect blood and urine
samples from volunteers beginning next year in a radical departure from its
usual question-and-answer checklist approach.

The $20-million project would involve a battery of lab tests on the blood
and urine of up to 10,000 Canadians in search of dozens of key health
indicators.
Researchers would look for diabetes, cholesterol levels, lead, pesticides,
SARS, HIV, herpes, West Nile virus and many other measures of the health of
the general population.

The survey would also include direct measurements of weight, which people
tend to underestimate when answering pollsters' questions, blood pressure,
fitness, back strength and many others. The urine and blood samples - and
possibly saliva samples - may also be stored for years so other tests that
have still not been developed can be performed later.

"There's enormous potential for this to inform policy at all kinds of
levels," says Mark Tremblay, one of the directors of the four-year
project known as the Canadian Health Measures Survey. "It's very, very
important."

The last such national survey in Canada was carried out in 1978-79, but
many other countries have routinely collected bodily fluids for testing,
including Britain, New Zealand, Australia and some European countries.

The United States runs the most sophisticated program, which determined
among other things that the American population had high blood levels of
lead. The finding was instrumental in getting lead additives banned from
gasoline in that country.

And in the late 1980s, Australia's national survey discovered that the
number of diabetics in the general population was double previous estimates
that had been based solely on questionnaires.

"For every known case of diabetes there, they had an unknown
case," says Mr. Tremblay. "So their estimates based on
self-reporting health questionnaires . . . were off by 100 per cent."

"And so you can imagine the importance of that in terms of projecting
future health-care costs, demands for services, etc."

Such fluid-sample surveys also record statistics for healthy individuals,
who frequently don't appear in existing medical records of hospitals and
doctors, allowing statisticians to analyse the effect and importance of
healthy habits.

Participants for the Canadian survey would be volunteers who are
representative of the general population in terms of age, sex and other
demographic factors. Residents of native reserves, members of the military
and people residing in institutions such as prisons will be excluded.

The samples are to be gathered in clinical settings, such as a mobile
clinic, and participants would not receive payment, though they will be
reimbursed for any out-of-pocket expenses such as travel. The amount of
blood extracted would be between 50 ml and 80 ml, or about one-tenth of the
amount taken during a blood donation. Results of the tests would be shared
with each individual.
A pilot project is to be carried out next year, with full sampling expected
in 2006, perhaps following the scheduled Canada-wide census that year.

Mr. Tremblay cautions that planning is still tentative. "There are a
lot of complicated features to this, and details to iron out," he
said. "We're in the early design phase. For one, the project still
needs the approval of Canada's privacy commissioner, as well as privacy
officials in the provinces", he said.


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