Mr. Chair, I would ask the committee members to have a look at this chart, which was distributed just before we began.
What it shows is a plot of the number of listeria monocytogenes isolates over the months of June, July, and August that we dealt with at the national microbiology laboratory. These are specimens coming in from all across the country. The different colours of red and orange represent listeria monocytogenes that were ultimately linked to the outbreak. The grey will represent other listeria that were the background noise here. On July 18, we found two cases of listeria that had an identical genetic fingerprint that ultimately proved to be part of the outbreak.
It was impossible at that time to know that it was the outbreak strain. On August 1 and August 8, we had two closely related but not identical bacteria that were from Alberta and Quebec, I believe. On August 12, we had results of a whole bunch of listeria that came from Ontario that had the identical strain. That's when we knew we had an outbreak. Those results are communicated in real time to their submitting laboratory, the Province of Ontario. On the next day, August 13, they were posted on what we call the Canadian Network for Public Health Intelligence, which allows front-line public health workers, on a roll-based way, to communicate about events that are happening.
This would have gone out to the entire public health community in Canada that is responsible for food-borne outbreaks. It's a fabulous real-time system that has been put in place since SARS, and this would not have been possible three years ago.
This listeria system for PulseNet is only about three years old. Since the outbreak we've further decentralized this. The system that we use, which we call PulseNet, is fundamentally a virtual laboratory. Laboratories across the country work with the same equipment, the same protocols, the same training, that produce genetic fingerprints, and then they compare them electronically on the database that we maintain.
If you find the same fingerprints in Alberta and Ontario, then it's quite a good chance that there's going to be some kind of link there. Since the outbreak has finished, Ontario has decided that they want to be certified to do that, and they've already been certified. Alberta has also been certified. At the time of the outbreak only Quebec was certified, and that was their choice.
I think we have two very good systems, the PulseNet system and the Canadian Network for Public Health Intelligence system, which lets us detect these kinds of events quickly--and we detected it at the time; there were 10 cases in a country of 30 million people and where there's a high background of enteric illness--and get the information out quickly to the people who need it.