Thank you very much.
Thank you all very much for coming and providing your expertise.
I was listening to Madame Gagnon asking a question on the number of deaths in the United States. I expect it's not as high, but it's pretty bad in Canada as well. That's why we're holding these hearings as to how this can be improved.
I look at the issues, most of which you've addressed, which are whether reporting should be mandatory or voluntary, reporting serious reactions versus all reactions, and who's to do the reporting. Should everybody be involved: medical practitioners, nurses, pharmacists? I think the only mandatory reporting is with the pharmaceutical companies. I think we're talking about hospitals now.
And you get to the question where someone dies or has a very serious reaction, and there's a lawsuit. Everybody gets sued. Health Canada, the pharmaceutical company, the doctor that prescribed it. They don't know; no one knows. I think you gave an example of a drug that may have been prescribed for a hip and someone took it for a knee. So you don't know these things.
It would be useful if the committee had statistics as to the amount of litigation in this country on all these issues. Does anybody have any statistics? If there are only some for Ontario, that would be useful.
There are all kinds of causes. There are errors in prescriptions or that the drug should or should not have been approved. There's a patient who takes increased medication, or not enough; in other words, they broke the rules that the practitioner was recommending. There are genetic issues, the issue that Dr. Haggie raised about something that is good for one part of the body but not for another part. Are there statistics out there that could help us?.