Thank you.
Thank you, everyone, for being here today.
Mr. Da Pont, I wanted to ask you about new drugs on the market. As you know, all drugs cause adverse drug reactions, and new drugs on the market do not have an established safety profile. They're essentially in phase four of testing. In the U.S., one in five new drugs put on the market will either have a new high level of warning—the highest level of warning, a black box warning—put on the label within two years, or actually be taken off the market for harming patients.
Vanessa's law will create an obligation for health care institutions to report all serious adverse drug reactions. This is great as an early warning system, but also while a drug is on the market to get warnings from doctors that a drug could be causing liver damage or heart arrhythmias, etc.
These wonderful people take care of us, and I mean it sincerely; they are wonderful people. My own brother is a surgeon, a tremendous surgeon. The problem is that our doctors refuse to accept responsibility to report adverse drug reactions, the serious ones. They don't want to do it, and there are a whole range of reasons they don't. I recently met the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association and asked for help on it: this information is lifesaving information.
Do you have any ideas or any comments on how we might encourage our health care professionals, let them know the critical importance of reporting serious adverse drug reactions, and encourage them to report them so we can get this information early and get risky drugs either off the market or get proper safety warnings put on the labels?