UBC Medicine

It’s not terribly difficult to spare a woman from the dangers of pre-eclampsia, the sudden onset of high blood pressure during pregnancy. She must be hospitalized so that her blood pressure can be managed, her seizures prevented and her delivery induced, which is the only sure treatment. But in the developing world, identifying women who [...]

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When a patient is harmed or comes close to being harmed in a health care setting, the first impulse is to blame the worker caring for the patient at the time. That person often winds up losing their job — a justifiable outcome to a public that is increasingly demanding accountability. But Sam Sheps is convinced it’s neither a [...]

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For the past year or so, the term “medical isotopes” has been surfacing in news reports with increasing regularity, and for good reason: the supply of those decaying atoms, which are the necessary ingredients for cardiac and bone scans, has been choked off. Canada’s medical facilities have long depended on a single nuclear reactor in Ontario to get the [...]

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A little more than a year ago, Canadians were inundated with stories about listeriosis, a food-borne infection. The source: meat products produced by Maple Leaf Foods. The toll: 22 dead, and untold numbers sickened. Now, a team led by Wilfred Jeffries, a Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics, the Michael Smith Laboratories and the Biomedical [...]

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