Thank you, Madam Chair.
I really appreciate the committee fitting me in and arranging for me to speak to you today. I am the provincial health officer for British Columbia. Since 2005 I have been the provincial/territorial co-chair of the Pan-Canadian Public Health Network, which you will know was established by the ministers of health post SARS to knit Canada's public health systems together federally, provincially, and territorially.
The Public Health Network consists of senior federal-provincial-territorial public health officials who report to the Conference of Deputy Ministers of Health. It has six expert groups, who draw on expertise across the country, looking at emergency planning, public health laboratories, surveillance, communicable disease control, population health promotion, and chronic disease prevention. It has links to the Council of Chief Medical Officers of Health across the country, who in fact make up about half the membership of the council. It also has links to the national collaborating centres for public health.
One of our major pieces of work since our formation in 2005 has been preparing and updating the Canadian pandemic plan.
In mid-April there was the emergence of a novel H1N1 influenza virus in Mexico. The Public Health Network and the federal-provincial-territorial deputy ministers established what were virtually daily calls to coordinate the activities and responses to this H1N1 emergence.
Some time in April or May, the deputy ministers of health created a special advisory committee on H1N1, consisting of every chief medical officer of health across the country, every representative on the Public Health Network, and the Public Health Agency of Canada. I have co-chaired that since its inception, with Dr. David Butler-Jones. This committee met daily until early June, and since that time it has been meeting twice weekly and reporting weekly to the federal, provincial, and territorial deputy ministers of health.
The organization is to focus on H1N1, and part of our work was to develop an organization that could respond in a timely fashion to the cross-Canada needs from H1N1. So we have created what's called a pandemic coordinating committee, which is a smaller group of folk from the network, including our relevant expert groups and experts from across the country. It is like an executive committee that focuses on the response and forward planning over the summer for what we believe will be the re-emergence or resurgence of H1N1 in the fall, when children go back to school.
That coordinating committee has put together a number of structures that draw on provincial, territorial, and clinical and epidemiological expertise from across the country. So we have a task group that is working on surveillance, epidemiology, and laboratory preparedness. We have another task group that has been preparing guidelines on infection control and occupational health. We have a group that has been working on a communications platform and building on existing work the Public Health Network did.
Part of our pre-existing pandemic preparedness that has obviously helped this year had been building antiviral stockpiles, developing proposals for accessing vaccines and plants for delivering vaccines, and building a communications platform for influenza in general that can be easily adapted to H1N1. We have a pandemic vaccine working group, which has been working on criteria for purchasing and developing a pandemic vaccine. We also have a group of our infectious disease control people looking at other vaccines--for example, a pneumococcal vaccine--and at seasonal influenza vaccine criteria.
We have a group that has been working on public health measures, school closures, summer camp guidelines, mass or group meetings, etc.
We have a group that is working with the chief veterinarians of Canada to look at human-animal transmission, the zoonoses implications for avian or swine infections on humans, for example.
We have a group that has been looking at clinical care guidelines. They have developed clinical care guidelines for pregnant women and are also developing clinical care guidelines for emergency room physicians, etc.
We have a group as well that has been looking at the use of antivirals and prioritization of groups and the necessity for antivirals. We have a group that has been looking at the antiviral stockpile management and the refresh, and we have a group that has been applying a lens across all these products to ensure that remote, isolated, and first nations communities are taken into account.
The work that these task groups have been doing over the summer, much of which has been completed and much of which still remains to be done, has been giving us a sense of where H1N1 is going globally, in the southern and northern hemispheres, tracking the spread of the disease, tracking its severity, tracking its impact on individuals, on communities, on the health care system, and on the broader social service system, and then producing guidelines that are evidence based, that can be used in the jurisdictions across Canada or, if they're not used identically--because they're not meant to be cookie cutters--will give the evidence-based principals on which jurisdictions can formulate responses, can provide guidelines to nurses, physicians, hospitals, health care workers, ambulance attendants, and so on, schools, day camp operators, or in fact the general public, so that we will have an evidence-based response in place and ready as we move into the fall, when we expect to see the second wave of H1N1 enter the northern hemisphere.
I could go into more detail on the work plans that have been approved by this group and presented to and approved by the deputy ministers of health, who would be ultimately reporting to ministers of health; or I could stop there and give you more time for questions rather than go through a list of the outcomes that we're going to deliver by the end of the summer.