Certainly, Mr. Chair.
I'll say to the member that it's a very good point. There are notifiable diseases at the provincial or territorial level. In other words, in legislation and regulation each province requires notice of a certain number of diseases, for a range of issues, including that we're trying to understand more about it and its importance in terms of public health impact. A range of criteria go into it, and they develop those.
There are also nationally notifiable diseases; you are correct. We have expert committees and provincial and territorial committees that review these on a regular basis. Their recommendation at that time was that it be removed, given its risk burden of illness etc. So it was removed from the list of national notifiable diseases.
The lesson learned from this is that doing so was probably premature, and now it will be, I'm certain, reintroduced—not as a nationally notifiable disease, as it's often notifiable provincially and, certainly in the case of laboratories, we know about these things. It is a way of enhancing the surveillance related to these issues.