UBC Reports | Vol. 48 | No. 6 | Apr. 4, 2002

In The News

Highlights of UBC Media Coverage in March 2002

Compiled By Brian Lin

UBC Tuition Fee Hikes

While a group of students occupied the Old Administration Building in protest, UBC's Board of Governors approved tuition fee hikes of up to 321 per cent on March 14.

UBC Vice-President, Students, Brian Sullivan said that the hikes will guarantee the quality of education. "We've had what we would regard as artificially depressed tuition levels in some of these programs and haven't been able to necessarily offer the value we want," Sullivan told the National Post.

Province columnist Michael Smyth said there's no such thing as a free lunch. "It's time B.C. students started paying some of the freight after riding the gravy train for so long," he adds.

Chinese newspaper Ming Pao Daily raised the issue of conflicts between student protesters and the AMS. Protesters took over AMS president Kristen Harvey's office, claiming she had turned her back on her election promise to help lower tuition.

Funding

The provincial government an-nounced a $134 million investment to almost double the number of doctors graduating in B.C. from the current 128 a year to 224 by 2005.

UBC will receive $110 million for a new Life Sciences Centre with the rest going to UVic and UNBC for new medical teaching facilities.

Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer calls the investment a "commendable innovation."

Health

According to a new CTV documentary, Michael J. Fox was just one of four film industry people who worked on a sitcom shot in Vancouver in the late 1970s who were later diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.

Donald Calne, of UBC Hospital's Neurodegenerative Disorders Centre told Good Morning America, experts have long theorized that exposure to environmental toxins or viruses can trigger Parkinson's Disease years later.

UBC Health Policy Researcher Barbara Mintzes is concerned about the overflowing of U.S. drug ads into Canada. "The ads look like any other ad, and it makes it also look like taking a prescription drug is just like going out and buying a candy bar, it really trivializes the medical treatment," she told CBC News.

UBC Medical Genetics Prof. Patricia Baird calls the new CIHR guidelines for government-funded stem cell research an important first step. "I think [the guidelines] are reasonable and humane, but they don't remove the need for legislation," Baird told the Vancouver Sun.

UBC Family Practice Prof. David Kuhl told the Oprah Winfrey Show on March 1 that people often achieve their greatest sense of personal growth while dying.

"Dying people want to speak the truth and dying people want to be seen as living," said Kuhl. "People with terminal illnesses also want to connect with their own sense of self, with their close family and friends and with God or some power higher than themselves."