Thank you.
The other part that I just wanted to mention is this. I just came back from China with the legislative association, and I heard on the news there that the City of Beijing, which has more than half the population of Canada, has reserved millions of traditional Chinese medicine doses to fight against the flu. So the Beijing municipal government is doing that.
When looking up why they are doing that, I found that traditional Chinese medicine is being widely used to treat H1N1 flu patients in China, according to a senior health official. China so far is the only country worldwide to introduce traditional medicine, TCM, as practised for thousands of years in China. The ministry of health recently released guidelines for treating H1N1 with a combination of western and TCM medicine for primary courses of treatment, and on and on.
Studies and symposia cited in The Lancet, by the WHO, and the ministry of health in China have indicated that a trial and experimental studies of traditional Chinese medicine have achieved a major breakthrough against H1N1.
So I guess my question is that in negotiating with the provinces for cost-sharing and working towards having enough doses of TAMIFLU, of which there may be some shortages, has the health ministry done research on traditional alternatives like TCM to partner with the provinces to help them make these alternatives available to people who can't or won't use some of the conventional treatments for H1N1?