Can I just add something to answer your question? We're constantly scanning the media and other reports to see what's out there. As you can well imagine, a number of events and reports come to us.
We have people on the ground. For example, we have seven regional offices in the marketed health products. They're people out there in the provinces and territories working with those communities, trying to get Canadians and health care professionals to report more, encouraging everybody to report more.
The minute we get this data, we're looking at it quickly, making an assessment: is this an issue or not? If it's something that is a really huge issue or something we need to communicate to Canadians, we have a variety of risk communications. We have some criteria to trigger the appropriate risk communications, without, as Mr. Lee said, panicking the population.
Sometimes we will do an information update. If this is one of those cases, we would provide information, put it on our website, put it on our MedEffect website, if needed. Then the second stage would be getting out information to the physicians. We have a health care professionals advisory that goes out through the CMA, through direct mailings, to all doctors in this country. It goes out to pharmacists in this country. We work with the associations.
We use the media as well to get this information out. We recognize that in a crisis situation we would have to get this information out as quickly as possible. For example, there was the counterfeit toothpaste issue last summer. We thought there might have been something in it. Through our inspection programs, we found reports and confiscated this toothpaste based on, I think, a complaint that came up. We analyzed it in our labs. We had to act within a 24-hour period. We erred on the side of having people ask us why we reacted so soon as opposed to why we waited so long.
This branch does a balancing act on a constant basis. We're trying to do this in a much more effective, responsive way. We have to target our resources to the areas of greatest risk. This is what the action plan is talking about, active prevention, because it's in all our best interests to make sure health and safety is protected.