Petitions   to obtain advice and evidence-based information about CCSVI treatment and take a lead role on the basis of this evidence in encouraging the swift adoption of the procedure in the territories and provinces. While l know that House rules do not allow me to explicitly endorse petitions, I

Health  Mr. Speaker, our government understands the difficulties of Canadians living with multiple sclerosis. Can the Minister of Health share with the House her latest efforts with respect to research on the possibilities associated with CCSVI?

Multiple Sclerosis  Mr. Speaker, today people living with MS are protesting across this country, including on Parliament Hill, for clinical trials for the new liberation procedure for chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency or CCSVI. Over 1,500 liberation procedures have been performed

Health committee  And hopefully the majority of that will go to MS CCSVI treatment, but you can't pick an arbitrary--

Health committee   know it's $16 million to CIHR. That's for everything, as you rightly point out. We also know that the money is for MS in general. We have asked for this to be specifically $10 million. The $10 million request that came from the MS Society was for CCSVI. What we have been advocating

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee   is related to MS, but how much is actually allocated to CCSVI.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee   malformations inserted CCSVI in the official guidelines of the medical vascular society.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  . Beaudet, in the research that the minister talked about last night, the minister said that they are eagerly looking for applications for MS and specifically this new CCSVI. Is there going to be clinical research that involves treatment in that? What are the restrictions on the research

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee   with those different data in mind, we have to ensure that first steps are correctly looked into. Therefore, we have funded, with our American counterparts, $2.4 million towards further understanding the relationship between CCSVI and multiple sclerosis.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  . But the question begs to be asked that if we are going to evaluate the notion, the hypothesis, that CCSVI and its treatment is related to and can benefit patients with MS, I think we have to do a proper, randomized, blinded, and controlled study to test the hypothesis, and not do what the MS

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Okay. We described the CCSVI treatment by means of standard balloon angioplasty in a paper published in the Journal of Vascular Surgery last December. According to our results, angioplasty was demonstrated to be safe. We never had major vascular complications and patients were

Health committee   wondering how much of that $16 million is specifically devoted to CCSVI, please.

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I will ask again. This was discussed last night. I do not need the broader context. I would like to know specifically how much of the $16 million is being devoted to CCSVI, please—the number.

Health committee  Is it specific to CCSVI or more broadly to MS?

Health committee  I think there's concern among patients across the country that right now there is no treatment arm being funded in Canada. Of the $2.4 million, only $700,000.... I would like to also ask, who will be reviewing this? It's important, if we are going to look at CCSVI