I spoke on pandemic preparation about two weeks ago at a convention in London and I said there are two things you can do wrong in a situation like that. The first one is to over-react, and the second one is to under-react.
I think the reaction from government officials in Canada, in the U.S., and a lot of other places was probably appropriate. We had a potential that was brought under control relatively quickly. The media maybe went a little too far with H1N1.
I am part of the group in Ontario that strongly has to do with awareness and notification, those kinds of things. I think an awful lot was done. In hindsight, after any event like that, you have to go back, debrief yourself, and figure out if more could have been done.
From our own standpoint, I didn't have something on my shelf for worker awareness on swine flu. I had a pile of stuff on avian influenza, personal protective equipment and proper procedures. I had to do some pretty quick 24-hour type stuff to make sure my website and my staff were brought up to speed.
But from everything I saw, we did a pretty good job across the country on something that wasn't necessarily a food safety issue but, rather, an exposure situation. I think we did a pretty good job of controlling, once we were aware of what we had. And that was the problem with that specific bug, being aware of what we had.