Yes. Thank you.
It's really critical that we separate biosecurity and biosafety. There is concern about biosecurity so that you know there's control over the pathogens you are working with, and those fall into risk groups 3 and 4. Biosafety is something all of us, as medical microbiologists and technologists and technicians, are trained to do and are inspected and licensed to do. It deals primarily with level 2 or risk group 2 organisms.
I myself am not aware of any event that has occurred that this bill would prevent. I'm not aware of any event that's been published in the literature or of which I have personal knowledge in which a level 2 organism has escaped from a laboratory and caused disease. We have outbreaks with level 2 organisms all the time, but they do not originate in a laboratory. We have to keep biosecurity and biosafety separated in the discussions.
Just to come back to the biosafety issue and these restrictions, remember that many if not most of the laboratories in Canada are in small hospitals and are intermingled with other departments, such as biochemistry and hematology, and technologists are cross-trained, so these kinds of regulation are going to affect not just microbiology but laboratory medicine across the country.