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Personnel

• Soo Cheng
• Professor Julian Crane
• Dr Wendyl D'Souza
• Dr Lis Ellison-Loschmann
• Dr Sunia Foliaki
• Pip Hall
• Ben Harding
• Nyk Huntington
• Clare Macdonald
• Professor Neil Pearce

Phase Three

The Massey University Centre for Public Health Research was created in 2000. It was headed by Professor Neil Pearce (ISAAC Executive and Steering Committee member) and accordingly it was decided that CPHR would conduct the Phase III survey in Wellington. Lis Ellison-Loschmann included the ISAAC Phase III findings in her PhD on asthma in Maori - the first PhD in epidemiology (anywhere in the world) to be completed by an indigenous health researcher.

Phase One

The staff of the Wellington Asthma Research Group were involved in the development of ISAAC even before it was ISAAC! Initially we were developing the video asthma questionnaire for use in various surveys and were invited to the initial meeting in Bochum which was the pre-birthplace of ISAAC in order to primarily talk about the video questionnaire’s use.

We were involved in piloting the video questionnaire in schools prior to undertaking the ISAAC study piloting both the written questionnaire versions together with the video questionnaire and then looking at the ability of both to predict airway hyper responsiveness as a marker of asthma. We had a number of staff working on the Wellington data centre in particular, Dr Wendyl D’Souza who ran the Wellington component of the study in the field and he together with two or three other staff visited the schools and organised both the parental completion for the 6-7-year-olds and the video and written components of the 13-14-year-olds. In many ways we had an additional interest and enthusiasm for the study in its early stages because of the novel questionnaire we were developing and because of our early commitment to the whole idea of undertaking international comparisons using simple tools. We had already run the ECRHS study in three centres in New Zealand, and further studies of children made a lot of sense.

One issue that I do recall either in the very early days of the ISAAC fieldwork or in a pre-testing phase where we were showing the video and comparing it with the written we came back from one school having completed the questionnaires and shown the video only to find an urgent message to be in touch with our local hospital Ethics Committee chairperson. It turned out that we had one particular school in Wellington where we had shown the video questionnaire to a group of children that included two children from a particularly strict religious sect who did not routinely use television or watch films in any form and the parents were upset that we had done this. This is something we had not contemplated during the development of the study although it did lead us to ask whether there were any children in future surveys whose parents did not allow them to watch television or see video images and these children had to be excluded – there were very few but it was the first time I had realised that there could be ethical issues showing a video questionnaire. In the end the issue was resolved and the parents understanding of our intentions.

Dr D’Souza who undertook these studies went on to use this data for his PhD, the initial study thus being an extremely useful contribution to his academic development as well as our involvement in the ISAAC project.

Julian Crane
Wellington Asthma Research Group
Wellington