Evidence of meeting #9 for Health in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was labs.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Judy Wasylycia-Leis NDP Winnipeg North, MB
All right.
I guess I'm getting a mixed message from you. Would you like to see the whole thing withdrawn and started again or do you want to fix this one up?
5:05 p.m.
Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary
We're not legislators. We don't know how much work that entails.
5:05 p.m.
Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary
I would say it's fixable if you leave out the level 2s. That's the general sentiment I'm hearing.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Judy Wasylycia-Leis NDP Winnipeg North, MB
Okay. That's good advice. We'll leave out the level 2s, and we'll try to get some control over the whole process of regulations.
With some other legislation, we have required the regulations to come back to committee for some oversight and to go to Parliament before they're finally approved. To your mind, would that be a useful check in terms of the whole regulatory process?
5:05 p.m.
Section Head, Medical Microbiology, The Credit Valley Hospital, Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada
We tried that, particularly about the technology. We're still waiting.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joy Smith
Madam Wasylycia-Leis, you have 10 seconds, so there's not much time. Do you want to quickly make a comment?
5:05 p.m.
Section Head, Medical Microbiology, The Credit Valley Hospital, Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada
I think that would be one option. Another would be to leave in the level 2s but to make lots of amendments just so that it's comprehensive and you're not artificially leaving something out of it that applies to the majority of labs in the country.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joy Smith
Thank you so very much.
We'll now go to Mr. Uppal. You had some questions.
March 10th, 2009 / 5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Tim Uppal Conservative Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB
Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you all for coming and adding your professional opinion to this bill.
I'm pleased that we're headed in the right direction. That's important, and I don't think we should be waiting for something huge to happen before we start looking at a bill. So we're headed in the right direction, and we'll try to work this one out.
There's been quite a bit of discussion about level 2s. Just to get it right, in your professional opinion, is it at all possible that in a level 2 lab you can change to level 3 or 4? Dr. Singer was here, and I don't know if he said it or someone else said that there is a possibility that with level 2s, in a level 2 lab it's possible to do that. There's a possibility of making that happen. Is that possible?
5:05 p.m.
Professor, Institut Armand-Frappier, Institut national de la recherche scientifique
Do you mean changing a lab that's actually level 2?
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Tim Uppal Conservative Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB
Not the lab, but the level 2 pathogen. When Dr. Singer was here he said it was possible to transform a level 2 pathogen to a level 3 or 4. Is that at all possible?
5:05 p.m.
Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary
Do you mean with genetic engineering? If you were to clone in a gene from a level 3 or 4 pathogen, by definition your level 2 would be upgraded to the next highest level.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Tim Uppal Conservative Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB
So there's no way to do it just from a level 2 itself?
5:05 p.m.
Medical Director, Public Health Laboratories, Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion
You can't do it without adding DNA. I just can't imagine such a situation other than in a research laboratory. That would not apply to 99.9% of laboratories that this would impact.
5:05 p.m.
Professor, Institut Armand-Frappier, Institut national de la recherche scientifique
In fact, what happens most of the time when you take a micro-organism out of its natural environment, like a human or an animal, where it is infectious, and you passage it in vitro, it loses its ability to cause infection.
In fact, what you would see more often is the other way. You have a virulent micro-organism that becomes avirulent by being passaged in a lab, and that's what happens most of the time. Most of us work with strains that have lost their virulence because of being passaged in vitro. Many vaccines are based on micro-organisms that were passaged many times in vitro so they have lost that virulence, and they can be used as a vaccine. You inject them, and they don't cause any harm except that you get protection from a subsequent challenge by an infectious form of the pathogen. Unless you create a Frankenstein, a monster, there's no way you can have a level 2 pathogen becoming a level 3 pathogen. The other way around is much more likely.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Tim Uppal Conservative Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB
My question is whether that Frankenstein monster is even possible--because we're dealing with biosecurity and safety.
5:10 p.m.
Medical Director, Public Health Laboratories, Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion
You'd have to know how you would define a level 3 pathogen. What's the definition? A level 2 pathogen in the wrong host is going to cause a disease more severe than a level 3 pathogen. So somebody who has C. difficile colitis is at much greater risk of dying than somebody who has tuberculosis. It's how you define a level 3 pathogen.
5:10 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion
I think if I understand what you're getting at, the need to control level 2 is because of concerns around bioterrorism. Again, as I think Dr. Carrie referred to earlier, there was the incident when someone sprinkled E. coli on salads.
For things like E. coli or Listeria, you don't need to go to a laboratory to find them. You can go to a lake, you can go to—
5:10 p.m.
Medical Director, Public Health Laboratories, Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion
Chicken. You can go to the Dominion and—
5:10 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion
You can go to Dominion and buy some hot dogs and you can find those pathogens. I think that was referred to earlier.
If you wanted to create outbreaks out of these level 2s, you wouldn't actually go to the lab to get the pathogens. There are all sorts of—Legionnaires' can be found in all sorts of ponds across this country.
5:10 p.m.
Medical Director, Public Health Laboratories, Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion
Yes. I think it's important to recognize that these level 2 pathogens can be obviously pathogens. But you have a greater risk of getting an E. coli infection barbecuing chicken at home than a technologist has working in a laboratory. I mean, these are organisms that are in our environment. That's why we isolate them in our laboratories, because they cause disease. But the disease comes from their natural environment.