Thank you for the question.
The role of the Public Health Agency, through its national microbiology laboratory, is to coordinate the overall PulseNet system, which is a network of provincial and federal laboratories that spans the country. The role of the national microbiology laboratory is coordinating this, providing training and certification of training to laboratory technicians across the country. We also manage the database that keeps track of fingerprints that are generated from labs across the country. We would provide surge capacity for certain provinces or other laboratories in the event that their capacity becomes overwhelmed. We also manage the connections with other PulseNet systems in other countries. So for instance we have a memorandum of understanding with the United States, CDC, that allows us to query its database and it is able to query ours, because very frequently these outbreaks occur across borders. We are working with Mexico and partners in Europe to help them get up to speed with similar kinds of systems for the same kind of reason.
We're kind of the hub of this network, with overall responsibility for coordination, training, and standard setting, etc.