OTTAWA — The federal government wants to spend $176,000 for a study on global travel patterns to help save Canadians from future pandemics.
The Public Health Agency of Canada plans to award a three-month contract to Dr. Kamran Khan of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
Khan has already done significant work mapping international travel into Canada and potential health scares.
He recently used the Vancouver Olympics to study mass gatherings and flight patterns and he has published on the high degree of correlation between the movement of air travellers and the spread of H1N1 influenza out of Mexico last year.
“The world is mixing and travelling more than ever before ... and when that happens there are unprecedented opportunities for diseases to move from one location of the world to another,” he said, pointing to West Nile virus, SARS and H1N1 as recent examples.
With more than two billion air travellers circulating the globe each year, the feds want to know how global travel behaviour changed during the course of the H1N1 pandemic and whether it had any impact on Canada’s health and security.
They also plan to ask Khan to study changes in travel patterns during the Olympics in Turin, Salt Lake City and Vancouver to help Canada better prepare for future mass gathering events such as the G20 in Toronto this June.
“Mass gatherings can amplify and disseminate infectious diseases quickly as people transport it back with them,” Khan said, pointing to a measles outbreak during the 1991 Special Olympics in Minneapolis.
Although most travellers enter Canada via the U.S. and the U.K., approximately one in 25 begin their travels from within China’s borders, Khan’ previous research discovered.
Mexico is where Canada’s second largest volume of international passenger traffic after China originates, the scientist also found.
althia.raj@sunmedia.ca
