You're right about Dr. Ellis. And we should mention that he put out a report on January 20 of this year, which said, “The TB situation in Canada, Forgotten by most, but not gone: a new TB case in Canada every 6 hours”, and a death every two weeks. He actually identifies a number of the problems, from the rise among aboriginal peoples, including delayed suspicion of disease by health care providers, delayed diagnosis due to time required to obtain sputum and X-ray data results...all of which are under the jurisdiction of the federal government and are not being done. That's why I'm so embarrassed.
I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I saw the sputum tests being done in a little tent in little rural villages of enormous poverty. They were sent off, and if X-rays were needed they were followed up and medicines were provided. Volunteer nurses were making sure that the medicines were taken. They're conquering it by that. We're not even doing that in Canada.
My question is this. Would it not make sense to at least have Health Canada and the FNIHB, with public health agencies, send in special teams to those hot spots in this country, like Lac Brochet, where they can't even get a team in to do the X-rays, where there are only 750 people but where they expect there is widespread tuberculosis in that community? Why couldn't they at least say, “We will do that today, we will send in a special team to those 10 to 15 hot spots in this country and get to the bottom of it”? At least get the accurate numbers, get the prevention, get the drugs in place, and start to work on it.