Health committee  Without having research capabilities, if you abandon MAPLE you are losing a Canadian industry; you are losing the opportunity for our post-graduate Ph.D. individuals, our academics, to have a very fruitful career in Canada. We are also abandoning our patients, because without hav

Health committee  The concern from the suboptimal imaging that was being talked about with thallium is based on radiation exposure to the patient, because it is a higher exposure than what we are looking at. It's also very difficult to schedule, and the patients are subjected to different types of

Health committee  It's a very important point that you make. Our perspective is that the decision to abandon the MAPLE reactors may have been premature, without taking into consideration all the collateral damage that has potentially arisen because of this, and there may be regulatory issues from

Health committee  One of the grants from CIHR is looking at ortho-iodohippuran for renal imaging. That's an agent I used 30 years ago. It's not a different agent, using iodine-131 versus iodine-123, but we already have the information. The lymph node is a very important research project, lymphosc

Health committee  Very much so. There isn't going to be a grand-slam, home-run solution to this. There's going to be multiple 25-cent solutions to enable us to have a proper management for medical isotope and health care accessibility in Canada from the nuclear medicine perspective. It's going t

Health committee  It is in the sense that there has always been the debate as to whether nuclear medicine will be around and whether we have to make the investment to ensure that there is a medical isotope supply for the Canadian population or whether the specialty will be replaced by something el

Health committee  I think the best way to describe this is as an example of what goes on in my department on a day-to-day basis. Because we're told there's only 20%, or 50%, or 80% supply, on a day-by-day basis it's like we're horse-trading: If I can reduce so much activity to do a certain test, c

Health committee  Yes. I think one of the important things we have to look at with the cost increase is that we need a one-time cost transfer to hospitals and clinics to address the surcharges we're facing. We need a nuclear medical equipment fund to allow modernization of our platforms to use les

Health committee  Thank you, and good afternoon. Nuclear medicine offers unique insights into disease that are not achievable with either CT or MRI alone. It is through a combination of functional imaging, which nuclear medicine excels at, and it is in conjunction with anatomic imaging such as CT

Health committee  Oh, I'm very sorry.

Health committee  So the effect would be the same as not having any medical isotopes at all. We're beginning to see rationed access and staff lay-offs, and departmental closures would be a potential if the costs become incremental. The effect of this will not be in the urban centres; the effect wi