God bless you.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure for me to actually walk the halls of this building. It's been a long time since I've been in this building.
By way of background, I've been at the University of Manitoba as a professor in food microbiology and food safety for going on 15 years now. I had a little bit of industry experience with Labatt's. I was fighting listeria in dairy operations in the northeast U.S. for five years. And I worked for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada for well over 12 years in Saint-Hyacinthe and also here in Ottawa.
I come to you to encourage and participate in this debate to improve the level of food safety in this country. I will take advantage of any and every opportunity I have to address issues associated with food safety.
When I heard that we had an “independent” investigator appointed to look into the issues around the listeriosis outbreak, I was extremely disappointed that it might represent a partisan approach by the federal government to address that particular issue. I've since met with Ms. Weatherill and was very pleased to understand that her interests also lie in uncovering as much information about deficiencies in the food safety system in this country as she can within the allotted time available. I am going to be very disappointed if at the end of this process, at the end of the activity of this committee, we continue to have serious needs with respect to solving food safety issues in this country.
The barn door is wide open, folks. I just sat here and listened to on-farm food safety systems. On-farm food safety systems don't work. They don't work. And they don't work because we don't control the recycling of pathogens from animal feed to animals. They're building up in the animal supply. I have numbers. I can give them to you. I'm sorry that I don't have a brief to present to the committee, but if there's any interest in having written words from me, I'd be more than happy to provide them to you--that's on-farm food safety issues.
The animal feed industry is a very large lobby and a very big industry. They are very concerned about specified risk material being fed to ruminant animals and then raising the whole spectre of the transmission of mad cow disease. Mad cow disease is not a food safety issue. That's not blasphemous; it's true. There's no solid evidence. A number of us believe that the organism that causes BSE does not cause vCJD in humans.
Where have interventions been useful in terms of preventing recycling of pathogenic organisms in animal feed to animals and then along the food chain to humans? It was as early as 1955, when it was decided, wisely, not to feed pigs uncooked feed. Cooking of feed has prevented large numbers of people from getting ill as a result of trichinosis. That's one example of what can happen. I have many others that I can give you, but time just won't allow me to do it.
The main issues associated with food safety in this country are the following. Dr. Usborne referred to one of them.
On food-borne illness surveillance systems, we don't have one that works. We have two systems in this country. We have the national notifiable infectious disease reporting system, and we have the NESP, the national enteric surveillance program. They don't capture the information that is generated when outbreaks occur.
The NESP pools laboratory reports from people who got sick from drinking water and eating food and puts them all together in one place. I can influence the results of those data simply by sending the laboratory some isolates that I get out of food, and it skews the results. The national infectious disease reporting system varies across the country. All organisms that cause food-borne illness in British Columbia, and I think in Quebec--and I can be corrected on that--are reportable.
At the federal level, food-borne illness that is caused by Staphylococcus aureus and Costridium perfringens, which are number five and number six in terms of causing food-borne illness, aren't reportable. When people get sick with reportable diseases in six of our provinces, the data are pooled together, they're aggregated. Other provinces don't aggregate the data. They come to Ottawa and you can't make any sense of them. We don't know what makes us sick and we don't know what foods containing those unknown organisms cause greater frequencies of illnesses. We can't say with any realistic certainty that we know what foods are more risky than others. If we don't know what the risk is, how in God's name can we manage the risk?
Food-borne illness surveillance programs need to be re-established, just as Dr. Usborne said a few minutes ago. We did it back in the late 1980s, early nineties, and we stopped doing it. It cost money. You have to make an evaluation on the basis of how important it is to you as the people who have decisions on where money is spent by the government. Food-borne illness costs $10 billion a year in this country. One out of three or one out of four people will come down with food-borne illnesses. We don't know how many die. We have no idea. We just use American data.
If we want to continue to do that, that's fine, but we eat different things from what the Americans eat. We have a different ethnic population background.
We have two tiers of food-borne inspection in this country that operate at the provincially and federally registered plants. We also have municipal governments and we have departments of health that are involved in inspection of food service. The standards are different, the level of training is different, and the result is utter confusion. There are gaps and overlaps in the system that are an embarrassment. We're not alone, because the Americans have a worse system. They do exactly the same kinds of things that we do. It's the same with the Mexicans.
It's time for better coordination among the various groups that are responsible for food inspection in this country. We don't need more inspection. We may need more inspectors in some instances, but we don't need more inspection. We need smarter inspection. We need better-trained inspectors who understand where the problems are in the food process. They get their hands around that.
Food-borne illness outbreak management.... If you have cared to take a look at the reports, the lessons learned that came out last week, they are a repetition of the kinds of sabre-rattling and political gesturing at the federal-provincial levels that occurred back in 1999, when Schneiders spread salmonella-contaminated cheese from one end of this country to the other and caused—and get this, folks—820 illnesses, and many of those were kids.
Thank you very much for your attention.