Zika virus

Canadian Olympians get green protection against Brazilian mosquitos

lavende4 — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 17:22:15 +0000

Canadian Olympians get green protection against Brazilian mosquitos

lavende4 Thu, 07/21/2016 - 13:22

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Left to right: Greenlid founders Morgan Wyatt, Adil Qawi and Jackson Wyatt with one of the biotraps they'll be donating to the Canadian Olympic Foundation (Image screengrab from YouTube)

Terry Lavender

Author legacy

Terry Lavender

Topic

Global Lens

Alumni

Rio de Janiero

Olympics

Zika virus

mosquitos

Creative Destruction Lab

Entrepreneurs

With the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro only weeks away, many athletes – including Canadian tennis star Milos Raonic – have pulled out of the Games, citing fears of contracting the mosquito-borne Zika virus.

But U of T graduates Morgan and Jackson Wyatt, two brothers from Brockville, Ontario, are doing their best to protect the Canadian athletes, coaches and officials who do fly down to Rio. The Wyatts are founders of Greenlid Envirosciences, a Toronto-based company that is enjoying great success with its fully compostable Greenlid compost bin. The Wyatts have developed the Biotrap – a biodegradable mosquito trap based on the Greenlid – and are donating hundreds of the traps to the Canadian Olympic Foundation for use in Rio. U of T News spoke to Morgan Wyatt about the mosquito trap.

Your Biotrap is generating a lot of publicity, with stories in the Globe and Mail and Metro News, among other media outlets. But it’s based on your existing product, the Greenlid. How did the Greenlid come about?

The idea first came when my brother Jackson and I were having to deal with compost and food waste in the kitchen. It was always a mess and the compostable bags always seemed to leak, and so we just thought there could be a better way. I had a PhD in chemical biology (from McMaster University). So I started to look at different ways we could maybe make a fully compostable container that didn’t leak.

We’ve been concerned about the environment for a long time – even in high school – and we just thought we had something that could actually make it easier for people to make those eco-friendly choices.

You introduced the Greenlid a few years ago. Has it been a success?

It’s been very successful. We have a tremendous customer base across Canada. We’re in about 2500 stores across the country. We found a local manufacturer in Ontario that was able to produce the bin. Ontario has a great recycling program so we actually use a lot of end-of-life recycled cardboard that’s collected around Ontario and we repurpose that into the Greenlids.

What’s your U of T connection?

We both have our undergraduate degrees from U of T – I have a BSc in pharmaceutical chemistry while Jackson has a BSc in physiology. We also took the Greenlid through the Rotman School of Management’s Creative Destruction Lab last year, so we were back at U of T quite a bit for that program.

What inspired the mosquito biotraps?

It was developed from the same technology that makes our compost bins leak-proof. We were looking for different applications that we could use this with, and one came up when the Queensland Health Authority in Australia contacted me looking for a biodegradable container to use for their mosquito traps that they set out to combat dengue fever. I worked with them for about 18 months to modify our current formulation so that we could get something that would last in tropical conditions and the conditions that are around a lot of mosquitos.

How do they work?

The biotraps mimic the breeding ground of mosquitos and are coated with insecticide so they target only the female mosquito. You just add water and they’re effective for four to six weeks. We can see a pretty significant reduction in the mosquito population as a whole when you put out enough of these traps in an area. Mosquitos only travel a few hundred metres in their lifetime, so if you put out enough traps you’ll actually decimate the mosquito population in your area. So they’re good for around your cottage or your home.

How effective are they?

Over 1,000 Biotraps were deployed in Queensland and shown to last for six weeks in both wet and dry conditions on a variety of surfaces (concrete, mulch, and dirt). During this time, the kill rate was established as greater than 95 percent within 5 minutes of making contact with Biotraps.

You’re donating Biotraps to the Canadian Olympic Foundation for the Rio Olympics. Did you approach them or did they come to you?

The Zika crisis began about two or three weeks after we began to ship the biotraps to Australia to help them combat dengue fever. One of the big questions was what are the athletes going to do down in Brazil, so we contacted the Canadian Olympic officials. My brother and I, along with our business partner Adil Qawi, will fly to Rio de Janeiro with several hundred traps. Some will be put around the actual Olympic facilities in Rio and some will be put out in trials in Brazil in smaller communities, because the government and the health authorities there are interested in purchasing them.

Obviously, you’ll be cheering for the Canadian team. But what if other teams approach you asking for Biotraps?

We’re focussing mostly on the Canadian team right now, but if other countries are interested in having them around, we can actually facilitate that, since we are bringing extras traps down with us!

What does the future hold for Greenlid Envirosciences?

Right now we’re probably going to be optimizing the Biotrap and working on a larger family format for our compost bin.

We hope to donate and deploy at least 100,000 Biotraps in 2016. And for every Biotrap someone buys, we will donate one trap to communities that are affected by mosquito-borne illnesses. You can learn more at our crowdfunding campaign at https://www.igg.me/at/biotraps.

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Zika, pollution and politics: How Olympians compete against stress

lavende4 — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 15:48:37 +0000

Zika, pollution and politics: How Olympians compete against stress lavende4 Mon, 07/11/2016 - 11:48

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(iStock photo)

Katie Babcock

Author legacy

Katie Babcock

Topic

Global Lens

Olympics

Zika virus

Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education

Sports

Athletes

For many high-performance athletes, the 2016 Rio Olympics represent the pinnacle of countless hours of intense physical and mental preparation. After dedicating their lives to competing at the 17-day event, how do they deal with the pressure to perform? And how do they deal with additional concerns, including Zika virus, polluted waters, infrastructure problems, possible political demonstrations and potential doping issues?

Assistant Professor Katherine Tamminen, from U of T’s Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, explains how these athletes cope with psychological stress and whether it could make or break their performance.

How do Olympic athletes prepare for competition when the host country presents so many challenges?
While Rio presents many challenges for athletes, other Olympics have had similar issues. There were security concerns at the Sochi Olympics and Beijing had a lot of air pollution. I think that the key thing to remember is that the athletes, coaching staff and Olympic staff have been planning for this event for years. This includes contingency planning and developing protocols to ensure that athletes are safe and ready to perform. These plans cover small issues like what to do if an airline loses equipment to larger security planning, which involves liaising with site organizers.

In terms of dealing with the risk of Zika virus, the Canadian Olympic team is constantly monitoring the health risks to athletes. I know that Rio’s organizing committee is advising athletes to use insect repellent, stay in air-conditioned rooms and wear long-sleeved pants and shirts when outside. The South Korean team has been given formal attire that’s infused with insect repellant. These solutions reflect the organizers’ commitment to remove as many distractions as possible for the athletes. The coaches, support staff and organizing committees have a critical role in communicating to the athletes how to prepare for competition and what’s being done on site to minimize risks.

What tactics can athletes use to deal with stress in these challenging situations?
Everyone has a very individualized approach. Having social networks is important, including supportive teammates, trainers, coaches, friends and family members is crucial. This reduces the likelihood that the athlete will experience stress in the first place. On the flip side, some teams at certain times will minimize cell phone or social media use because it can be distracting.

A lot of high-performance athletes and teams have sport psychologists working and travelling with them for a long period of time before the Olympics, so they’ve been working on mental training strategies including visualization, positive self-talk and relaxation. These techniques will help address both expected and unexpected issues in Rio.

In general, there’s a lot of research to suggest that if athletes see competition as a challenge rather than a threat they’ll have more positive outcomes. Instead of just minimizing anxiety, it’s also important to promote feelings of pride, joy and happiness surrounding the Olympics for athletes to perform their best. And anxiety isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If an athlete is at the starting block and they’re anxious, that can be okay – if they feel nervous that’s usually a sign that the race matters to them. So it’s completely normal to have anxiety, but it’s important to use that to your advantage. If an athlete is feeling nervous or anxious before they compete, they can try to use positive self-talk or they can reappraise the situation to see it as an opportunity and a challenge – and these are skills that they’ve likely been using for years to make it to the top level in their sport.

Does the psychology of sport make or break an athlete’s performance?
There are so many things that go into optimal performance and sport psychology is one piece of an athlete’s overall preparation. There’s also hydration, nutrition, sleep, training and a multitude of other things that athletes do to prepare for the Olympics. There are situations where nerves get the best of athletes, like false starts at the starting line, so in those situations, being able to control their emotions can mean the difference between a disqualification or getting off to a strong start.

Their confidence, and their ability to overcome challenges, is founded on confidence in their training and the skills they’ve developed. It will be exciting to see how athletes, and particularly Canadian athletes, perform at this year’s event.

What advice would you give to athletes preparing for Rio?
I would say that they should keep doing what they’ve been doing all along. They’re already quite successful and they should trust in the foundations they’ve built. First-time Olympians can also rely on athletes who have competed in past Olympics for advice on how to stay focused and enjoy the event.

Rapid, low-cost detection of Zika virus developed by experts at U of T, Harvard, MIT, Cornell and more

lanthierj — Thu, 05 May 2016 20:22:57 +0000

Rapid, low-cost detection of Zika virus developed by experts at U of T, Harvard, MIT, Cornell and more

lanthierj Thu, 05/05/2016 - 16:22

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Health officials fumigate against Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in Jakarta (photo by Dasril Roszandi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Jef Ekins

Author legacy

Jef Ekins

Topic

Global Lens

Zika virus

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Public Health

International

Subheadline

Researchers hope easy-to-use, paper-based tool will “make a positive impact on public health across the globe”

It’s a cheap, fast and easy way to detect the Zika virus – using a freeze-dried piece of paper the size of a stamp.

And it was created by the University of Toronto’s Keith Pardee and experts from seven other leading research institutions.

Details of the breakthrough were published in Cell on May 6.

“We hope that, through this work, we have created the template for a tool that can make a positive impact on public health across the globe,” said Pardee, one of the lead authors of the study and an assistant professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy.

“The diagnostic platform developed by our team has provided a high-performing, low-cost tool that can work in remote locations. We have developed a workflow that combines molecular tools to provide diagnostics that can be read out on a piece of paper no larger than a postage stamp.”

The collaboration included Wyss Institute, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Arizona State University, Cornell University, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Broad Institute. The team used toehold sensors and isothermal RNA amplification to create the diagnostic sensors. The results: a cell-free, paper-based platform that can host synthetic gene networks for use outside the lab.

It’s a much-needed solution to the challenge of diagnosing the Zika virus, said Pardee (pictured below).

Right now, reliable diagnosis for patients suspected of the Zika virus involves nucleic acid-based testing. That kind of testing depends on laboratory access, highly specific and expensive equipment and trained technicians – and is unavailable in remote locations where surveillance and containment are critically needed.

This new technology, on the other hand, is easy to use, portable, requires little to no training – and costs less than a dollar per test, Pardee said.

Specifically tuned to the Zika virus, sensors are applied to small paper samples. A saliva, urine, or blood sample – equivalent to the amount required by blood glucose monitors that test blood sugar levels – is applied to the sensors, triggering a response that provides visually evident results in as little as an hour.

If the sample contains the RNA of the Zika virus, the test area turns purple.

Earlier this year, the World Health Organization declared the Zika virus a public health emergency of international concern. While the symptoms experienced by most infected patients of this mosquito-borne illness are mild – fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis – recent strains of the disease have demonstrated links to fetal microcephaly, birth defects, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and other neurological disorders.

With the onset of nicer weather, this disease is expected to expand to new territories and countries.

“Our synthetic biology pipeline for rapid sensor design and prototyping has tremendous potential for application for the Zika virus and other public health threats, enabling us to rapidly develop new diagnostics when and where they are needed most,” Pardee said.

While this study demonstrates proof-of-concept, the team is eager to secure the necessary partners and resources to proceed to the product development phase, Pardee said. That would be followed up by scaled-up manufacturing and distribution so that the diagnostic tool can be deployed for use in the field.

Ultimately, he added, the development of quick, easy-to-use, in-the-field tests for Zika and similar pathogens could help governments stay ahead of pathogen outbreaks, curbing the spread of disease and lessening the burden on already overtaxed healthcare systems.

“The utility of new low-cost diagnostics that can be deployed to combat public health threats like Zika is tremendous,” said U of T’s Shana Kelley, an expert in rapid diagnostics. “The work of Keith Pardee and his colleagues is a very important step forward as emerging threats appear.”