Thank you very much for those excellent questions. I think we're all struggling with the issues you've talked about.
Let me address the neurological health population study and what it can tell us. The study will look at impact and will project impact out over the next 20 years. Within that context, it will look at the economic issues associated with living with neurological diseases.
One of the studies--and I brought the list of studies with me--that's happening out of Dalhousie University is looking at the everyday experience of living with and managing a neurological condition. I'm really looking forward to that particular study, because it will look, at a very practical level, at the health, the social, and the economic side of living with a neurological condition.
In answer to your question on whether we are going to be getting information to help us understand the impact on the economy, both at the level of the workforce and at the level of what they call the macro-economy, yes, we are going to be getting that information. The researchers come together annually to report out on what they're learning. Their next meeting will be in January 2012. It would be great to involve as many of you as could possibly be there to understand what these researchers are finding, because we're just starting to drill down on some of those tough questions on this issue. So there's more to come on that, but I'm happy to share with you the program of research so that you can see with more depth what these folks will be studying and understand how the economic impacts are going to play into that.
On the issue of other countries we can look to, when I look around the world I look at models that are being developed in the United Kingdom, in Australia, and in some of the Scandinavian countries. The Scandinavian countries have had a lot of success in the heart health arena, in reducing cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular disease outcomes, so I think we can go there to learn how to take a population approach to these things.
In terms of the health care system transformations, the U.K. is doing a great deal of work in that area. I think we can learn a lot there. But nobody has this one solved: there's no one country that I would point to and say, boy, they really know how to do this. Of course, that's because our contexts are so different and the way we deliver care is so different, as are the ways in which we deliver prevention and how we've adopted prevention in our various countries.
But the collaborations that are happening in research across the world are really starting to help us identify what we can apply in our own country, based on what is being learned in other countries, and I'm excited about that, especially in the area.... I'll point out Alzheimer's disease because it relates to the topic today, and also because it's just such an important area for us as a country to get our heads around in regard to how we're going to deal with this as our population ages.