As the team did with the Western Desert Kidney Health Project, they organised for a group of Goldfields school children to create a “sand animation” promotional video that will be launched shortly on Facebook and YouTube.
“It uses the ancient method of teaching, which is called milbindi. It’s the way Aboriginal people have taught for millennia, by drawing in the sand, the dirt, parna. So, we’re using that to tell the story about the project, what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it,” she says.
The comparison teeth from Perth school children will be provided by the ORIGINS program.
“They already have those teeth,” Dr Jeffries-Stokes explains. “They have a cohort of 10,000 children, and we will match the teeth by comparable age and sex.”
The project team’s hypothesis is that there will be differences in heavy metal contamination between the two sets of teeth.
“We hopefully will see differences,” Dr Jeffries-Stokes says, “but if we don’t, it’s also useful information – that children are not getting significantly different exposures from the environments out here, which would be great and reassuring.
“But if we show they are, that becomes very important; because we then need to protect them. We know that children in all these remote areas from Kalgoorlie and across to the border have higher rates of some diseases, and so the next step would be to look at whether there’s any correlation between these toxic metal exposures or heavy metal exposures and the patterns of disease we see.
“We don’t know whether environmental exposures are a factor or not, but it would be nice to be able to say yes, they seem to be; or no, they don’t, and we can focus our efforts on other areas of research.
As the team did with the Western Desert Kidney Health Project, they organised for a group of Goldfields school children to create a “sand animation” promotional video that will be launched shortly on Facebook and YouTube.
“It uses the ancient method of teaching, which is called milbindi. It’s the way Aboriginal people have taught for millennia, by drawing in the sand, the dirt, parna. So, we’re using that to tell the story about the project, what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it,” she says.
The comparison teeth from Perth school children will be provided by the ORIGINS program.
“They already have those teeth,” Dr Jeffries-Stokes explains. “They have a cohort of 10,000 children, and we will match the teeth by comparable age and sex.”
The project team’s hypothesis is that there will be differences in heavy metal contamination between the two sets of teeth.
“We hopefully will see differences,” Dr Jeffries-Stokes says, “but if we don’t, it’s also useful information – that children are not getting significantly different exposures from the environments out here, which would be great and reassuring.
“But if we show they are, that becomes very important; because we then need to protect them. We know that children in all these remote areas from Kalgoorlie and across to the border have higher rates of some diseases, and so the next step would be to look at whether there’s any correlation between these toxic metal exposures or heavy metal exposures and the patterns of disease we see.
“We don’t know whether environmental exposures are a factor or not, but it would be nice to be able to say yes, they seem to be; or no, they don’t, and we can focus our efforts on other areas of research.
