The truth of the matter is we're at a very early stage in trying to understand these things. My understanding is that Health Canada is initiating a bio-monitoring program in the very near future, so we'll begin to get some metrics for Canada, very important ones. I salute them for initiating that work and for the support behind it.
We are really at the very beginning of trying to understand what's going on here. Let me give you a good example. There is a chemical called PFOS. It's one of the ingredients used in the manufacture of Teflon. There is a similar one, PFOA, that was used in the manufacture of Scotchgard. The companies, particularly 3M, when they started looking at their Scotchgard ingredient, conducted a study because they wanted to evaluate their workers, who they knew were exposed and had blood levels of this chemical, against clean blood from the population. They purchased blood from blood banks all over the United States. When they sent those samples to the lab, there was no clean blood. Then they went to Europe. Then they went to China. The clean blood they found, that they felt most comfortable comparing to the adult workers' blood, was blood that was collected from army recruits during the Korean War and archived.
What we really have here is the very beginning of studying pollution in people. We need to know a lot more about it. We need to know when the contamination begins. We thought for many years that most of these pollutants didn't pass the placenta, that it was protective. It was not the case.
To be honest, when you have a small non-profit organization like mine, with a budget of less than $4 million, doing the first study that's detailed and extensive looking at umbilical cord blood, that's a pretty sad state of affairs in terms of the science for the industry, if you ask me. So we're only beginning to know, sir.