News

Fourth vaccine dose available to elderly Manitobans

Those aged 70+, Indigenous 50+ and care home residents eligible

NEWS

Colton McKillop, staff Fourth doses of COVID-19 vaccines are now available for anyone aged 70 or older and Indigenous people older than 50 in Manitoba.

A fourth round of shots will also be available to all personal care home and assisted living facility residents.

Second boosters will be accessible in Manitoba as early as mid-April and will be available according to the same timetable as previous vaccination efforts.

This change was spurred by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization’s (NACI) recommendation last Tuesday that provincial governments offer a second booster shot to people 80 and older.

NACI also suggested that regions consider distributing fourth doses to any adults older than 70.

Ayush Kumar, a professor in the department of microbiology at the University of Manitoba, said the NACI likely made this announcement because data suggests immunity gained from vaccination lowers over time, putting elderly and immunocompromised people at particular risk.

Kumar said it is difficult to predict whether a fourth booster in vulnerable populations would prevent a surge of hospitalizations that could overwhelm the health-care system.

“We do know that hospitalization rates are increasing, rates of infections are increasing,” he said.

“I think last time I checked, [the] test positivity rate in Manitoba was listed at around 18 per cent, but we also know that that’s just the tip of an iceberg because we’re not doing a very good job keeping data and sharing data.”

Kumar called this lack of data the “biggest challenge.”

“Without knowing what age groups are being hospitalized, it’s difficult to see whether this would prevent overwhelming our health-care system,” he said.

“If [data] was being shared, then we would be more confident in predicting what might happen in the future, but right now nothing is being shared.”

According to the most recently released data, 80.13 per cent of Manitobans are double vaccinated and 42.86 percent have received a third dose.

The province also recommended fourth doses for immunocompromised people last December.

staff Mohammad Arsalan Saeed / photo /

in them, so […] chances of mutations are very, very high.”

In contrast to Canada’s high vaccination rate of 82 per cent, only 58 per cent of the world’s population is vaccinated.

“Basically, countries that have access to vaccination […] will keep boosting their own population, but how often can you do that and how much can you do that?” Kumar said.

“Unless you actually prevent […] emergence of new strains, we’ll be just doing this all the time, and the only way to prevent this is to have mass vaccination.”

Provincial, national vaccinations not enough to prevent new strains

Kumar said the “strategy needs to be mass vaccination […] across the world” to prevent the rise of a new variant.

“The way the virus would mutate is if it has a host where it can multiply and as it multiplies, it mutates,” he explained.

“That only happens when people don’t have [an] immune response against a virus and that immune response will happen in people who have been vaccinated. If you have 50 [to] 60 per cent of the population around the world […] not vaccinated, the virus is still dividing in them and still multiplying

news@themanitoban.com

Winnipeg deliberates regulating short-term rentals

Possible rules include requiring owners register with city

NEWS

Colton McKillop, staff The City of Winnipeg is considering regulations for short-term rental apartments such as Airbnbs to address issues with fairness in the hospitality sector, noise and criminal activity.

City planners will spend the next six months considering regulations such as requiring owners to register with the city, criminal background checks, limiting the number of rentals in a given area or condominium, restricting units to primary residences and imposing a five per cent municipal accommodation tax similar to the kind hotels already pay.

Since 2008, Winnipeg hotels have paid a monthly five per cent accommodation tax determined by their total bookings, with revenue being used to support tourism via Economic Development Winnipeg.

Jino Distasio, a professor of urban geography at the University of Winnipeg, said regulations such as registration and background checks are meant to “ensure that any premises that’s going to be occupied by anybody is safe.”

“The city also requires rooming houses to be licensed and inspected to ensure that individuals that are staying there are also compliant with building and occupancy standards,” he said.

In a three-hour meeting last Tuesday, city council heard from 14 delegations offering feedback on the proposed regulations, which the city is planning in consultation with short-term rental owners, the hotel industry, tourism experts and people living near shortterm rentals.

Winnipeg condominium owners have complained short-term rentals in their buildings have resulted in parties, noise, violence and crime in their buildings.

The Manitoba Hotel Association is requesting Winnipeg only allow property owners to list their primary residence, as those in cities like Toronto, Ont. are required to do.

Distasio said the effect on affordable housing should also be considered when “an organization or group [secures] multiple addresses as a business” and charges daily rather than monthly rates.

“That’s, I think, where […] people are seeing the pressure, when [groups are] taking multiple units off the market as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a couple of rooms or I’m not going to be here for a couple of weeks, so I’m going to rent my place either by the day, by the week or by the month,’” he said.

“I think it’s about scale and I think what the city has said in bylaws is that homeowners can and have always been able to run a number of small businesses out of their homes, but there is often a threshold.”

Some Airbnb owners have argued at city council meetings that the primary residence rule would harm the shortterm rental market in Winnipeg.

photo / Basel Abdelaziz / staff

Canadian and North American cities in imposing such rules.

“How do we want to regulate this industry to balance the informal ability of an individual homeowner to make some money on the side by renting out a room [with] the evolution of short-term rentals as a true industry, where a small consortium of individuals own multiple units and apartments that are offering shortterm rentals?” he said.

“I guess the sector can’t have it all. You can’t have the total freedom of very few regulations when you start to cross over into really running a larger-scale operation.”

High-risk, high-reward funding for amniotic fluid study

Researchers search for a new paradigm of transmission in the womb

RESEARCH & TECHNOLOGY

Michael Campbell, staff Chris Pascoe, an assistant professor in the Max Rady college of medicine, has been awarded funding from the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) to support his research into investigating the causal link between smoking mothers and poor infant lung health. The NFRF, which supports highrisk, high-reward interdisciplinary research, announced more than $1.2 million awarded to University of Manitoba researchers across five projects.

Pascoe, along with co-investigator Meghan Riddell from the University of Alberta, plan to explore the possibility of amniotic fluid transporting inflammatory proteins from the mother to her fetus, thus carrying the damaging effects of smoking to the baby.

“There was a paper that was published that I thought was really cool — it was in mice — where they looked at mice where they had made them to have a higher level of an inflammatory protein in the amniotic fluid,” Pascoe said.

“And when they looked at the offspring, their airways were twitchy, or they had more signs of asthma. And so, my thought was, OK, if you can make mice look like this by giving them more of this inflammatory cytokine, what things might be influencing the level of that protein in the amniotic fluid?”

Pascoe reached out to laboratories and found no one was keeping amniotic fluid samples along with other tissue samples after birth. Riddell, who works with placental biology, had the necessary access to tissue samples for Pascoe’s emerging project idea.

“We decided to apply to this [NFRF] grant with the idea being that this kind of fits that high-risk, high-reward setting, which is [that] nobody has looked at it, nobody knows if we’re going to find anything,” Pascoe said.

“We may find absolutely nothing. So in that case, it’s high risk. But it’s also high reward because, if we do find something, then it’s a new paradigm for how the outside environment gets communicated to the fetus.”

Scientists know that blood is likely a carrier of these cytokine proteins, but according to Pascoe, lungs do not receive much blood in the womb which leads him to believe there is another tissue that transmits these proteins across the placenta.

This project is considered high-risk because Pascoe and Riddell have no pilot data to suggest that launching a full-scale project will likely show the results they expect. Pilot data, which suggests feasibility, is an essential part of most grant applications. Once the researchers have data on the amniotic fluid, there may be several subsequent research questions that emerge.

The interdisciplinary nature of this study also makes it novel. Pascoe’s research interests include studying lungs, smooth muscle mechanics and muscle contractibility, while Riddell focuses on gynecology and obstetrics. If their research finds these proteins are shared with the fetus through amniotic fluid, they will have discovered a new method by which information is transferred from the outside world into the womb.

In the first year of the study, Pascoe and Riddell will use a multiplex enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay to test upwards of 50 different inflammatory molecules in the amniotic fluid of approximately 100 individuals. This test will help the researchers develop an inflammatory profile for cigarette smokers. Then the researchers will test the inflammatory profiles on a model consisting of cells to see how the cells react.

“We use a model of epithelial cells,” Pascoe said.

“These are the cells that line the airways. You can think of them as your skin, but inside your lungs. And so, in asthma there’s certain changes that occur within these cells, the most apparent one […] is mucus. These cells, in asthma, they make a lot of mucus.”

In the second year of the study, researchers will be trying to characterize the reaction between amniotic fluid and epithelial cells.

Pascoe and Riddell are currently recruiting a master’s student to assist with the project with the hope that there may be more research opportunities in the future.

“Given that this is a two-year grant, really to focus on an area that’s not explored at all — this kind of highrisk, high-reward — the hope would be that we find some signals that are interesting [and] that we can pivot this into a larger, longer-term grant,” Pascoe said.

provided / Chris Pascoe photo /

“We may find absolutely nothing. So in that case, it’s high risk. But it’s also high reward because, if we do find something, then it’s a new paradigm for how the outside environment gets communicated to the fetus”