Extension work | With few funding sources, researchers advised to improve communication
BANFF, Alta. — The Victoria Day weekend of 2003 was one of the loneliest of Shirley McClellan’s life. She harboured a secret that once revealed, would devastate thousands of people.
McClellan, Alberta’s former deputy premier and minister of agriculture, was leaving Edmonton for her family farm in east-central Alberta when she got the news that a case of BSE had been found in the province.
“I was certainly very aware of how this was going to affect us,” she said at the Alberta Prion Research Institute conference in Banff May 26-29.
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Now chancellor of the University of Lethbridge, McClellan looks back on the decisions and argues they were right for the time.
The government led by Ralph Klein was determined to preserve the livestock industry.
“He (Klein) said, get the industry together, make sure they are integrally involved in what you do, and we will stand behind you 100 percent.”
One legacy of this period is establishment of the institute to study all prion related diseases to make Alberta a centre of excellence. Klein regarded it as an investment.
As a policy maker managing public funds, it is often easy to cut funds from research or continuing education, said McClellan, because the public knows little about those issues.
She said scientists must take responsibility to ensure governments and other funding sources know the importance of the work they are doing.
“I want you to understand how important what you do is,” she told researchers at the conference, many of whom rely on government money.
However, there needs to be a better way to transmit information on what is done at the research level to maintain taxpayer and industry support, she said.
Linda Detwiler, formerly with the United States Department of Agriculture and now at the Mississippi State University veterinary school, said the public demands action when serious diseases emerge and that can often drive policy decisions.
“We all want policy based on sound science but the problem is that the science is a moving target,” she said.
“If we have an emerging disease, the disease drives the policy makers to make decisions in absence of information. We can’t sit around and do nothing.”
When a disease occurs, there is a need for control, followed by a call for more research. The disease then subsides and funding declines.
However, it takes a long time to get research going and results are often slow.
“These are diseases clamouring for resources both monetary and personnel,” she said.
“We are so much better off if we can prevent things from happening first rather than reacting to them,” she said.
But the challenge of selling prevention is difficult because it requires convincing people to take action that will cost them or intrude into their lives, said Detwiler.
“If you take the necessary actions, how do you prove your actions prevented disease?”
