Yes, all these things are infectious diseases that will happen all the time, despite the tightest regulation that one can have. This is how we handled the pathogens. Listeriosis had nothing to do with handling the pathogen. It had to do with not carefully cleaning the meat plants. SARS was an infectious disease from Asia that was not spotted maybe as rapidly as possible in Toronto. This is an infectious disease; this is public health. It has nothing to do with the manipulation by itself of the pathogen. How the manipulation of a pathogen will help is if we can do research about this, where we may have improved diagnostics, improved treatment for those diseases.
On March 5th, 2009. See this statement in context.