I'm going to refer to a report of this committee in 2004, in which all of your organizations participated. In fact, I think Mr. Fruitman gave testimony. Page 5 of that report was on post-market surveillance. The report dealt with a number of things, advertising as well, and that may have been why you were there.
It says this: “In 2002, the department received more than 8,500 domestic adverse reaction reports and more than 106,600 foreign adverse reaction reports. There were 169 recalls of drugs for human use for the same year.” And this is the sentence I'm concerned with: “Health Canada estimated that half of newly approved therapeutic health products have serious side effects identified only after approval and marketing, due to exposure with the larger population.”
My question is this. We're looking at post-market surveillance, but what about the approval system? I find that sentence rather shocking, actually. This is after approval. Have any of you put your thoughts to whether we're looking at the wrong thing, whether the approval system should be improved? I don't even know how that could be.