Thank you very much.
I just wanted to clarify some things.
I think it's interesting that you asked for physicians to be involved in this, because if you're talking about human health, it is something that I think physicians should have a say in.
When a drug is being considered for the market—and the best example, of course, is thalidomide—and it fulfills all the requirements and answers all the questions correctly—like neonicotinoids are doing—then everyone says it can go on. The thing about trials is that they are done on only a small group of people, on certain cohorts, and once they hit the general population—or, in the case of pesticides, the general environment and diversity of environment—in vivo, so to speak, certain things occur that did not occur in a controlled setting. When you are in vivo, you see what is happening and what did not happen in vitro. So you have to be able to track adverse effects.
Is the department doing a good job of tracking adverse effects? I heard from Mr. Gage that of course they're not doing any tracking of it in workers, but are they doing any tracking in, for instance, an area that says it is having trouble, in which bees are dying out when that's not happening elsewhere in Canada? We will want to track the specifics that are creating this problem in order to decide whether an adverse effect is actually applicable to a particular drug.
I want to know if this happens, because pesticides are a huge part of the food chain and what we eat and how we live, so they have a direct impact on human health. I'm not even talking about the environment right now, but as far as the environment goes, we see impacts on insects. The ecosystem gets disrupted. It is important for us to ensure that this is being tracked. What we call adverse reporting will come up after the particular drug or, in this case, pesticide has been out there for a while. Is that happening?
