Jim Dunn

Sen. Wm. McMaster Chair in Urban Health Equity | Prof & A/Dean Research @McMasteru | Scientist @MAP_Health | @Ticats enthusiast | Houser:

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@michaelgeller The blog says annual savings of $500,000, but I see from your tweet it is $500,000,000. Wow. What a massive regressive transfer that delivers only $50/month for a homeowner.

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@MorganLaidler Check out this series of articles about the CFL and the Grey Cup by Ray Ratto - through the eyes of an American https://t.co/919P1sHQfR

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

Low barrier, permanent supportive housing 100%

[Raghu Venugopal MD @raghu_venugopal]

MP Dr. Strauss is justified in highlighting the ongoing challenges of our opioid epidemic. I attend to opioid users pretty much daily. Let me outline the challenges: 👇👇👇
1. Some patients flatly refuse suboxone. That's pretty common.
2. Many patients have used opioids very recently and just aren't candidates for suboxone.
3. Like Dr. Azar said, they're homeless and there are no shelters. I'm sending the gambler right back into the casino.
4. There are no detox beds.
5. There are no medical detox beds.
6. Off banker's hours in ER there's just nurses and ER doctors - that's when a lot of patients come. Holding them until the morning in ERs bursting at the seams is not tenable.
7. There is not one magic cure for all patients. There's no silver bullet. Some need OAT (Kadian, Suboxone, Methadone) and yes, some with wrap-around support need safe supply (I don't prescribe that).

If I was to pick one magic silver bullet to all of this - it is unquestionably to me, as an experienced ER doctor - housing. Stable housing. This is 100% apolitical and we should be able to agree on this. @strauss_matt

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@JohnPasalis Grow and strengthen our non-market sector housing providers so that they have the scale, sound management, asset management and risk mitigation necessary to attract long-term institutional capital (incl. Cdn pension funds). Then welcome patient foreign capital through that path

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@AzizSunderji @nytimes @profgalloway @kylascan You out-did me Aziz, I took this 1986 book out of the library last week to compare it to today's talk https://t.co/hn7sZWuWY7

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@AzizSunderji Good observations. Friction of distance is real, and there's still only 24h in a day.

In the Greater Toronto Area there's talk about demand for ground-oriented housing. At this stage of the development of large metros, that's only possible with investment in rapid transit.

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@ActualNosferatu I was in Cincinnati when Demar Hamlin of the bills suffered commotio cordis. That was a scary, strange experience.

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@pmcondon2 Strongly recommend the documentary "The Flaw". Ostensibly about the GFC it is really about understanding housing as an asset market and the important influence of growing inequality and growing credit.

[Bullpen Consulting @BullpenConsult]

COVID Broke the GTA New Condo Market. What Rises From the Ashes Will Look Very Different | UrbanToronto https://t.co/wfvWS1yVqp

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

This is an epic performance. RIP Sass and Jeff

[Oscar Duh Grouch @oscar_z_grouch]

Sass Jordan and special guest Jeff Healey perform her hit, I Will Make You A Believer live in Toronto 2003. 😑

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@ActualNosferatu Epstein?

[Andrew Egger @EggerDC]

Real bleak!

https://t.co/dUFfCgLuiS

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@mackinprof @AdrianMorrow @globeandmail Yep. See this from 0:17 to 2:24 https://t.co/1HJ71Bh72c

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

Alarming news. PISA is the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment. PISA measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. https://t.co/ckxNYWRcZf

[Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo]

The PISA 2025 results are out today. Some quick insights.

- The major story is very significant global decline. The last PISA study was in 2022, and saw big declines in reading and maths scores from 2018. Obviously the pandemic played a part.

- But this 2025 round has seen further falls even from the 2022 lows!

Things haven't gone back to normal post-pandemic - they've got worse.

Every generation thinks the generation below is less smart - but this time they might be right!

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@VoiceOfFranky I feel you. Elbow injury from off-season simulator play has added 2 strokes to my handicap. No pain anymore but I am still protecting the injury.

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

Nice. Bryan Adams, Mark Carney and Terry Fox.

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

Forever Canada.

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

@Graff2023 Long period of super low interest rates was huge too. Without it, alot of the very small units everyone bemoans might not have been built.

[Jim Dunn @UrbanHealthProf]

Wow. Just wow.

[Sarah Gallagher @sgallz_]

In 1990, Dolly Parton went on vacation in Ireland.

She walked into a local pub in County Kerry and delivered a flawless performance of Coat of Many Colors.

A heart of pure gold who made people smile across oceans.

[TheGlobalFaultlines @GlobalFaults]

Canada has options. It can diversify trade, strengthen European and Indo-Pacific relationships and reduce its dependence on the US. The more Washington pushes in that direction, the more attractive those alternatives become.

This isn't tough negotiating. It is destroying goodwill and calling the resulting resistance a negotiating problem.

Trump may believe America's economic weight gives him unlimited leverage. Lutnick seems to share that assumption.

The problem is that leverage only works while the other side still wants the relationship badly enough to compromise.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

We just crossed a line in medicine that humanity has been walking toward for a hundred years.
For the first time, doctors can take a biopsy of your specific tumor, read its unique DNA mutations — the exact fingerprint no other cancer on earth shares — and build a custom mRNA blueprint written for one human being. Yours.
It doesn't poison the cancer. It teaches your own immune system what to hunt.
And this week, Phase 3 results confirmed it works.
Added to the best immunotherapy we already had, this individualized cancer vaccine has been dramatically cutting the odds that high-risk melanoma comes back. In the earlier data, the combination reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49%, and the risk of the cancer spreading to distant organs by 62%, compared to the standard treatment alone. This week's Phase 3 readout confirmed the benefit holds. That is not a modest tweak. That is a different trajectory for a human life.
And melanoma is just the first door. The same approach is now in trials across lung, bladder, and kidney cancers — a whole program of them, racing forward.
Understand what this actually means, because it's bigger than one drug.
For all of history, we fought cancer with blunt weapons. Cut it out. Burn it with radiation. Flood the whole body with chemotherapy and hope the cancer dies before the patient suffers too much. We were swinging a hammer in the dark.
This is a blueprint. A weapon designed atom by atom for one person's disease, that turns their own body into the thing that finds and destroys it. We are watching medicine shift from managing cancer to hunting it.
I've spent my life as a physician, and I did not expect to see this so soon. We were told personalized cancer vaccines were a thirty-year dream. They are happening right now, in real patients, with real data, in our lifetime.
I don't say this lightly, and I say it as a doctor who knows exactly how rare these moments are: this is one of the most hopeful things to happen in the history of the field.
I woke up thinking of the words of the morning prayer — Modeh Ani — I thank You. Gratitude, the moment you open your eyes, for a soul returned and a day given. To be alive at the exact hour when human beings learned to teach the body to cure itself feels like standing inside that prayer.
We are not at the end of cancer. But we are, unmistakably, at the beginning of the end of its reign.