Thank you.
Speaking through the chair, we did respond to the letter, with my response on the 29th back to the group. There are two points to make.
First of all, when Toronto Public Health was investigating two cases in a nursing home in Toronto, there was no outbreak at the time. Health units are continually doing investigations and submitting food samples. They do that through proper channels, and they did so in this case too. To say that if they had been doing it correctly in the midst of an outbreak they would have submitted it to a regional lab.... There was no outbreak at that time, on July 21. They were doing their normal sampling.
Our lab itself will get 20 to 100 samples a day. There are processes that go through us; there's all sorts of food sampling being done and going on to the labs accordingly. The correct place to send it was to Health Canada's lab, which is the Listeria Reference Laboratory. That would not be out of order, and it was not inappropriate for them to send it there.
One would wonder, if it went to that lab and there were cases detected...we talk about laboratory surveillance. If there were indications of increased numbers of cases that are of concern at the laboratory level, especially from one federal authority, you would assume there would be some networking or discussion to alert the other side if there was something in their mind that was remiss or of concern. That's with that level. I don't how that worked or should work.
On the aspect of when they're notified, part of our process in the past in working in conjunction with the Foodborne Illness Outbreak Response Protocol has been that we notify our partners in a fairly prompt time. On July 29, we put out a kiosk report—the kiosk report is how we are proactive in notifying our public health partners both in the province and across the country—to our federal counterparts, including the Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada, and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, who monitor these reports and are alerted that we are undertaking an investigation. It gives the context of it, so that our other partners—and, we now hear, some American counterparts—can look at it and assess or ascertain whether they need to be aware of it or ask us any further questions to clarify it. So we had done our part to alert the wider sector on July 29.
As for the comment about whether someone was on a teleconference or not on the 30th, when we call for a teleconference and there are anywhere from 40 to 100 people on, we can't do the full roll call to know whether someone is at it or has walked away from the microphone. So in that sense of “report”, we checked the records and couldn't document whether this person was on during that teleconference or not, but we had already notified everybody of the fact that we were undertaking this investigation on July 29 through the kiosk system.