Health Committee on June 10th, 2010

[Dr. Jeff Farber]

There are a number of other options, and we always like to say that we provide an outcome-based approach. Obviously, industry has the main responsibility for producing safe food. We set the standards. We say, for example, that we want them to produce food that has listeria absent in a certain amount of product. It is up to them to use processes within their plant to do that. For example, they could use a heat process and they could use pressure to inactivate the organism. There is a variety of means at their disposal to inactivate the organism and/or prevent its growth.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

To go back to what you were saying about seeing the patterns of outbreaks and understanding them and reacting to them with a bird's-eye view of the macro situation, can you help me understand what that looks like? Is it pre-sale of the product or pre-consumption of product? What are you tracking? It's probably all.

[Dr. Jeff Farber]

Yes, it's all, but the one I was specifically referring to was trend analysis. So, for example, you have to know what the baseline in your plant is.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Right.

[Dr. Jeff Farber]

You track an organism; then you may see a blip one day, whereby it's going up. You know at that point that you have to really focus. What is actually going on? You get your whole HACCP team in the plant to take a very aggressive look. Is this an issue? There are plants we've spoken to recently that have meetings every day to discuss lab results. They go in and do a root cause analysis and make a great effort to get rid of what I was referring to before as those niches in which listeria can be found, to get rid of those biofilms or niches.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thank you.

Ms. Ballantyne, you spoke about fast-tracking approvals of food additives that have food safety benefits. My understanding is that there was a backlog of these approvals, so it's great to hear that the fast-tracking could be happening.

Has the backlog at Health Canada been ameliorated?

[Meena Ballantyne]

Yes, it has been.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Joyce Murray]

Excuse me, it will have to be a very quick answer. Time's just about out.

[Meena Ballantyne]

The backlog has been reduced, and we prioritize based on public health benefits. What we have to do first is a safety assessment, and then we have to put it through the regulatory process, because each food additive has to have an amendment to the food and drugs regulations. That process takes quite a long time. But the backlog has been reduced.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Joyce Murray]

Thank you.

Mr. Brown.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Looking at some of the positives, I understand that Canada is one of the best-performing countries in the 2010 food safety performance world ranking study. Its overall grade was superior, earning it a place among the top-tier countries according to the OECD food safety performance world rankings. That's certainly encouraging to hear.

I understand that 538 new inspectors have been hired since 2006, which I think highlights that things are heading in the right direction.

I understand there's a new initiative with regard to traceability. I'm not sure whether anyone can comment on this, but I understand that next year there's an investment of $20 million as part of the livestock auction traceability initiative. Do you have any information you can share with us on that?

[Meena Ballantyne]

That was the issue we were talking about earlier, which is really within the agriculture portfolio. It would be better for us to get the answers from CFIA and Agriculture, to give you accurate and more precise information.

[Dr. David Butler-Jones]

The point is that it is an area of emphasis and work, and something that they're working towards. The investment, I think, will certainly assist that.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

That's certainly one of the reasons the agriculture committee took an interest in this. It intertwines a lot more with that committee, but it's great to have the Public Health Agency's opinions on this.

To see the OECD speak so glowingly about Canada on food safety is something I'm certainly proud of from a health perspective.

I know that my colleague Cathy McLeod has a comment to make as well.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

It's a question.

I quickly went through the brochure, and as I went through it I was noticing, for example, that you talked about safe meats as being pepperonis or whatever rather than deli turkey. I think we all believe that deli turkey is a much healthier choice than pepperoni, so how are we putting a lens to the thinking around what we're recommending?

[Dr. David Butler-Jones]

I'll get started from a public health standpoint and then leave it.

One thing that OECD and others.... Some 90% of Canadians have confidence in the food safety system in Canada. But it's interesting that a little less than half of them think you can tell food is bad by looking at it. Unless it's really rotten, you just can't. It's growing things in the fridge. So we still have a lot of work to do locally as well in education, understanding, and application.

In terms of how we're doing, everything is about relative risk. If you drink too much water, you die; if you don't drink enough water, you die. It is about the balance. Clearly turkey, leaner cuts, etc., from a general health standpoint are safer. But if you happen to be someone who's immunocompromised, then you want to make sure it's cooked, because of the risk. It is always about balancing risk. Not everybody is going to have a problem with listeria; in fact, the vast majority of us won't. All of us are potentially susceptible to salmonella, so cook your chicken. If you have hamburger meat, most of us are susceptible to E. coli 0157 or other toxigenic E. coli, so cook your hamburger all the way through. Those are very practical things.

But for a lot of us, our tolerance, our immune systems, are quite adequate to deal with deli meats. I wouldn't want everybody switching from turkey to pepperoni, just from the obesogenic aspects of it, if nothing else.

I'll turn it back over.

[Dr. Jeff Farber]

It's a very good question and point that you brought up. We have already had a number of these discussions, for example, with the Council of Chief Medical Officers of Health group that I'm working on concerning listeria education.

Just to give you the one example of old age homes, for these elderly individuals, a lot of these meats are a very good source of protein and are very easy to chew. We had a lot of discussions on this. Do we really want to tell them to avoid these?

It comes back to Dr. Butler-Jones' benefit risk. For example, if you really know, there are things you can do by way of the sourcing and also the storing of the meat. If you're sourcing it from a very good supplier, are eating it right away, and know how it's been stored, you could look at the benefit risk and say, yes, this makes sense for this person: they really need their protein and they love this. These are discussions we're going to have once the base document is finished, and we'll be rolling it out to the provinces.

It's a very good question.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Joyce Murray]

Thank you.

That concludes our second round of five-minute questions and answers. We have time to go into another round.

I would like to begin with Dr. Bennett.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

We've learned today that really, in terms of the continuum, it's pretty hard to look at just the health side without having the CFIA officials here. Just as an example, I understand there's a vaccine that has been found to be effective against E. coli 0157 for cows, but no one seems to want to do that. That's obviously a public health issue, but where does it get approved, or how does it become stopped? Who makes the decision whether we go forward or don't go forward, when there's a vaccine that could prevent something ending up in the food chain, which is actually a public health advantage, but that would delay the commercial availability of that cow for a while?

Our concern has always been that CFIA seems to have this mixed job: promoting the industry and regulating it. This seems to get us into trouble. I thought Health Canada gets to set the rules, and then CFIA gets to enforce them. Could you explain how a decision on an E. coli 0157 vaccine for cows would be taken by the government and why it's not happening?

[Dr. Jeff Farber]

Thank you very much for the question.

The two departments, CFIA and Health Canada, actually get involved. The vaccine you're talking about was produced by a Canadian company. What it does is reduce the shedding of E. coli in the feces. It is one tool that can be used in the overall arsenal to try to reduce the load of E. coli 0157 in the food supply.

From what I remember, some of the difficulty is in showing the public health benefit of this. For example, with the use of this vaccine, can you actually show that you've had a reduction in the number of cases of E. coli 0157 in the human population? That is quite difficult to do because of the complexities of the system.

I agree with you that it is a good tool, but it is just one of the tools. There are other things that have been used—for example, bacteria flushes—to inactivate cells of E. coli.

So it's a good tool and one that can be used, but its efficacy in reducing the burden on public health due to E. coli 0157 is very difficult to ascertain.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Maybe David will just explain that for human vaccines we have a pan-Canadian process whereby all the provinces and territories and the federal government decide on cost-effectiveness, or whether or not it's recommended. This isn't exactly being put into the arms or the whatever of humans. What would be the process for determining whether this is cost-effective or not? It doesn't seem to be an inclusive process; it seems to be almost a process that is behind closed doors.

[Dr. David Butler-Jones]

I'll just speak to it quickly, and then I'll turn it over to Sammy.

The research is still preliminary on it. It doesn't eliminate shedding; it just reduces it. So that shed is still there, and once it's on meat it can still grow. So it doesn't eliminate the problem, it just shifts it and maybe gives a false sense of security, which is a concern.

We have that same issue with human vaccines. If you actually give a vaccine and all it does is you have more asymptomatic cases that are still spreading the virus, that's not helpful. As Jeff was saying--

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

But I think, David, this was about getting into the water system, in terms of these industrial farms, more than actually being present on the food.

[Dr. David Butler-Jones]

But there are other means to...I mean, they're engineering them. Whether it's pig farms or cattle farms or whatever, sewage containment and control in terms of environmental protection is another issue. It may be useful, but again, the studies to this point are, for instance, is it sufficient to actually make a difference? Are there other things that are more efficient? Are bacteriophages more efficient?

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

But I think the question was, who decides? How is the decision made?