Veterans Affairs committee  Andrew is my expert on this. Fifty-one individuals were prescribed mefloquine in 2013. We're down to 42 persons who were prescribed mefloquine after a discussion with a clinician. Sixteen times that would have received Malarone.

Veterans Affairs committee  Only 4.3% now, I think, of the prescriptions for people who receive medications to protect against malaria are for mefloquine. The vast majority of the rest are for Malarone, followed by doxycycline. As I said, the numbers are small. It was 43 who had mefloquine. About 800 got ot

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't have that information available.

Veterans Affairs committee  I can only speak to the military context. I can't speak to what was told to people back when we initiated mefloquine in I guess 1992. I can tell you that today what we use is the information that comes from the monograms for all of the medications. As I said before, we talk abo

Veterans Affairs committee  I can't comment on what was put in the records. Often a physician, when counselling a patient, will make annotations about the nature of the discussion. They may not annotate all of the specific details of each of the adverse effects they may have discussed. Oftentimes, that's w

Veterans Affairs committee  If the risk of malarial infection is high enough.... Malaria has significant morbidity and mortality risks associated with it, so we would probably make a decision not to permit the individual to deploy unprotected into a situation where there is a risk of malarial infection.

Veterans Affairs committee  A decision would have to be made, either at the personnel or the chain of command level, as to whether or not it was considered to be reasonable to take that decision, given their current personal situation. There may, in fact, be some action with respect to whether or not they c

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't make decisions about whether or not somebody would lose a career—it's our personnel area that does that—so I would be cautious about making a comment there. There would be an evaluation of the individual's continued satisfaction of the universality of service requirement.

Veterans Affairs committee  On the number of 5%, on the fact that we've gone from a high percentage of people using mefloquine down to 5%, it's difficult for me to speculate as to why that has happened. I think it is really about making sure that we're educating patients about the risks of malaria and the

Veterans Affairs committee  Is that question for me?

Veterans Affairs committee  Medical records are possibly archived, yes.

Veterans Affairs committee  Just as with any medication that has adverse effects, we have seen some patients take mefloquine who didn't like the side effects. Often it is about the dreaming. Sometimes it's about nausea and dizziness. We always give them the option of being able to change their medication to

Veterans Affairs committee  The current process is dependent on the size and nature of the deployment. If we have small numbers of people going off as UN military observers, for example, they would have a briefing with a preventative medicine technician about the risks of the region they're going to, whic

Veterans Affairs committee  I can speak to having this policy in place since 2004. I can't speak to the exact policy that was in place back to the time of the deployment to Somalia. I think, though, that there have been reviews by the Auditor General and the commission of inquiry for Somalia that have ident

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm not sure what information they used to generate their evaluations in reports. If there has been an encounter with a health care provider with respect to counselling on a medication and a prescription, it should end up in a medical record, and it would have been a policy that