Health Committee on Nov. 4th, 2010

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

On slaughter.

[Paul Mayers]

I don't have an absolute number for non-slaughter today.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Could we have those numbers, please? We really need those statistics.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Point of order, Madam Chair. The audits and the things my colleague is talking about are actually things that are outside the Weatherill report. These are things that CFIA did on top of what was put in the Weatherill report, I believe, so I don't think it really does apply to the study we're going forward with.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

It's fundamental to the health and safety of Canadians.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Excuse me, Dr. Duncan. If you have something to say, I'll recognize you first.

You may go ahead.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Is it okay? I wanted to say I think this is fundamental to the health and safety of Canadians, and these are important figures. We need to know.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Today we need to focus our questions on the implementation of the recommendations. I believe this is outside that, so could you refocus your question? Thank you.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

I will also ask if the following information could be tabled. I'm wondering what money was provided for hiring inspectors. How much of that has been spent? What is the average time taken to hire an inspector? How many are hired as of today? Could we table the dates that inspectors were hired and how many were hired? How long does it take to hire an inspector? How often will these hires be updated with new training, and will a record be kept of their training?

I'm wondering if that could simply be tabled.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Your time is up, but I've given you some extra time, actually.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Mr. Mayers, would you like to just briefly try to answer that? Or you can table it later to the committee as well.

[Paul Mayers]

Just briefly, clearly I won't try to answer all of the details, such as the amount of time for each hire. In terms of the funding, there was an immediate investment of $75 million the government made in the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and budget 2010 added an additional $13 million. You asked in terms of the resources that facilitate the increase of inspection capacity. In terms of numbers, as Madam Swan has noted, of the 170 inspectors who are being added, we are already at 150.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you so much.

Now we will go on to Ms. McLeod.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I do recognize that this issue was really an integration in terms of health and agriculture. I do understand that the agriculture committee has really spent a lot of time looking at its side of the issue, so with all respect to CFIA, I think I'll perhaps focus a little bit on the health side, which is of course the focus of this committee.

To start, tell us what Panorama is going to be able to do. Tell us, because we didn't have Panorama, if it would have made a difference in terms of what happened with the outbreak, so we could sort of understand the purpose and function and what it's going to provide for us.

[Dr. David Butler-Jones]

Panorama is the name for an integrated suite of tools, not just for surveillance but also case management. In the budget--I think it was in 2004--money was given to Canada Health Infoway for the development of a surveillance tool that could also serve as a case management tool. There are a number of aspects to the modules. The one we're piloting is around food-borne illness.

All provinces have been involved in the discussions, and a number of provinces have signed on to it. Different provinces use different systems. The reason for the funding in the first place was the recognition of the value of a system that could bring together the work of a public health nurse, a public health inspector, and immunization records. You can interrelate the data more efficiently and have more timely data in terms of reporting, for instance.

There are many systems out there, but this is the one it was felt would be valuable to put together. Now it's coming to the point where provinces are actually looking at implementation. Not all provinces or territories will be implementing it at this point. Some have other systems they use. Our chief concern federally is that whatever systems are used, the systems are able to either talk to each other or we have a way to recognize when a potential outbreak is developing and gather the data for the information we need to do our collective jobs.

In the old days we used to do that by paper--or if there was something urgent, a phone call, etc. Now, with the advent of the linkage of the public health laboratories across the country, the PulseNet Canada system allows us to say, “Oh, this particular listeria is the same strain of listeria we're seeing in the three cases in Ontario, the two cases in B.C. What are the characteristics of that?”

That's what allowed us to figure out that we actually had an outbreak with the listeria outbreak at Maple Leaf Foods. At the peak of that outbreak, there were only five to seven cases a week reported in Canada, against a background of 20,000 to 30,000 of us every day with those symptoms.

There is the combination of the laboratory surveillance we do and the work in comparing with other surveillance systems--and if there is time, perhaps Frank can speak a bit more to that--so that we have the picture we need to identify when something is going wrong.

Whether it's for this, or the next H1, or whatever, Panorama will hopefully give us faster, more accurate data because of the ability to electronically roll up that information. It doesn't keep us from doing our jobs--there are other ways we get that information--but it will make it more efficient. It will make the work of inspectors and nurses hopefully easier in terms of the collection of information and the management of cases.

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

Certainly I'd love to hear from Dr. Plummer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Dr. Plummer?

[Dr. Frank Plummer]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

To expand a bit on what David said, the electronic laboratory surveillance--what I like to call the virtual laboratory ability--linking labs across the country is a very powerful tool. We've been working on enhancing that.

Even with the listeria outbreak in 2008, we were able to detect a national outbreak when there were only eight cases in the country, at a very early point. If we didn't have that system, we might have found it weeks later. Many more people could have eaten food that was contaminated and potentially become ill.

I think this system is highly effective in early detection of national outbreaks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Ms. McLeod.

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

If someone comes into hospital and they have symptoms that are suspicious, that gets reported to the public health inspector. Does the lab in the hospital do the work, and then it feeds into the provincial system and then the national system?

[Dr. David Butler-Jones]

Frank can speak to the lab system.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Go ahead, Dr. Plummer.

[Dr. Frank Plummer]

The initial work will be done in a hospital laboratory. That would then be fed to a provincial laboratory, which would have the capability of the molecular fingerprinting of a listeria or E. coli or salmonella. That would then be shared nationally, electronically. We don't have to send the strain to Winnipeg any more; we can send a picture of what the fingerprint looks like.

The folks in Winnipeg, or the folks at the provincial laboratory, are able to interrogate our database, plus other databases around the world, to see if that fingerprint has been seen before. That makes for quite a rapid system. And the fact that it's decentralized across the country....

[Technical difficulty--Editor]

[The Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you, Dr. Plummer.

We'll now go to Monsieur Dufour.