Professionals affiliated with BC Children’s Hospital brought information on their cutting-edge health science work to Yukon schools and to the public at MacBride Museum. The visiting programs conducted by the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute were the Mini Med School held at high schools around Whitehorse and the Mini Science Night at the museum on March 27. Quynh Doan, senior executive director of the research institute, explained that the team visiting Whitehorse is engaging with the public and visiting schools to discuss health science. She said the visit she made was to Grade 11 and 12 science students at CSSC Mercier where the discussion focused on various health science fields and the value of exploration and curiosity. The MacBride Museum event included presentations on allergies and genetics. The presentation from Dr. Tiffany Wong, an allergist, dealt with the mechanism behind the development of allergies. She explained that allergic reactions are the immune system reacting to things that are supposed to be safe for people. It does so through the release of chemical mediators, with histamine being the one people are most likely to be familiar with. She detailed common external allergy symptoms: Rash, coughing and other respiratory trouble and gastrointestinal symptoms like vomiting or diarrhea. Wong noted that the symptoms don’t always occur together, but when they do it is called anaphylaxis. Wong also spoke about the various ways allergies are diagnosed with an assessment of the patient’s history being the most important. “I would say about 80 to 90 per cent of the time I can figure out if somebody is really having an allergy just by asking questions and seeing what happened, hearing what happened,” she said. Beyond hearing about patient experience when exposed to potential allergens, Wong described a test in which the patient’s skin is exposed to small quantities of allergens as well as the use of a blood test. She noted that the skin test leads to false positives because it is irritating and the blood test is prone to false negatives but it is used when patients have a preexisting skin irritation or if they have taken an antihistamine that could make the skin test unreliable. Wong added that testing is often done by exposing people to increasing amounts of potential allergen in the controlled environment of the allergy clinic. She also addressed how exposure to allergens in early childhood can lead to lifelong allergies, especially when the exposure is to broken skin. Dendritic cells, a part of the immune system, are very smart, Wong said. They know the skin is supposed to be an excellent barrier for the body but Wong said in an instance when that barrier is compromised, such as when a baby has eczema, exposure to common foods such as peanut butter, even via a parent’s kisses can cause their bodies to form an allergy. Using test cases, Wong explained the mechanisms and treatments for a variety of common allergies. Speaking to dog allergies, she said that tests show there is really no such thing as a hypo-allergenic dog. She also offered a breakdown of how many common food allergies are actually traced back to allergy to pollens. The crowd at the MacBride Museum also heard from professor of medical genetics Dr. Wendy Robinson. Robinson explained the history of scientists’ understanding of chromosomes and the genetic code. She noted that the number of human chromosomes wasn’t correctly identified until 1956. “If I make the analogy of the human genome being like a book, then the chromosomes are kind of like the table of contents. So by looking at the chromosomes, you can kind of see, are all the chapters there are in the right order?” Robinson said. This stage of development only allowed for partial understanding of human genes. As with a table of contents, researchers could only see what was present, not read the whole text or code. Robinson said that by the 1990s, more disorders that are based on genetic abnormality began to be properly diagnosed. This has become increasingly sophisticated since. She said computers play a major role in modern analysis of genes allowing for the reading of longer stretches of DNA. This lends itself to more accurate analysis and the detection of information such as which parent an abnormality originates from and other things that couldn’t be gleaned from the reading of shorter sequences. There is a genetic component of many health incomes: Robinson noted the role in miscarried pregnancies and Down syndrome specifically. “Our ability to identify these genetic changes has increased dramatically, it helps us understand the biology as well as the clinical outcomes,” Robinson said. She said the information obtained from genetics inform prognosis, treatment, recurrence and risks making it a powerful clinical tool. “It’s an exploding field and there’s a lot left to know.” The evening at the MacBride Museum concluded with a chance for the audience to discuss the scientists’ research. Contact Jim Elliot at jim.elliot@yukon-news.com
Yukoners learn about allergies, genetics and more at BC Children’s Hospital event
