Thank you very much. Welcome, Minister.
There were some questions asked by my colleague Ms. Davies that I wanted to expand on.
The first one had to do with the SAP and the removal of the decision by the department to allow for diacetylmorphine to be used with certain patients, These patients are a very select group. They do not respond to methadone or to suboxone or to any of those other things, and they actually only seem to respond to heroin. This comes from the NAOMI trials and other trials, as well as SALOME.
Now, if these patients cannot get this, what they do is go back to heroin, which at the moment is only available on the street. So the question is, is withholding this heroin from them a good approach? It's a start to treatment and to getting them off and getting them on lower doses, which has been shown to work in Europe and in Australia and across the world for quite a long time now. This would help these people to get off the drug eventually and save their lives, because if they go back on the street, they're back to petty crime and to injections of heroin that can kill them.
This is a life-threatening problem. Can you quickly tell me about that? That's my first question.
I want to allow you to answer them all, so I'm just going to give them to you. The second one has to do with research on HIV. I think it's interesting to note that you're spending a great deal of money on research on HIV, but I wondered if you have met with and have decided that it is a good time to look at the highly active antiretroviral program going on in British Columbia, which has now been adopted by China, by Brazil, by the United Kingdom, and by France. With this program, people who are deemed to be HIV-positive are given a drug whose effect is that by the end of the first two doses they no longer create enough virus to infect others. It's known, therefore, as treatment as prevention. I know that the Canadian government has never paid any interest to this, which is kind of sad since we should be really proud of it. This is Banting and Best work that is being done. That's my second question.
My final question is this: you're taking on the food inspection agency, which I think is a good idea. I've always believed that it should be in one place and that PHAC should in fact be in charge of this. So I think it's fine, but I wondered, when you do so, are you going to look at some of the recommendations that came out of the report that the United States had asked that Canada do? This is about prevention strategies and oversight and technical training and better-trained inspectors and looking at research on preharvest ways of dealing with things. Are you going to look at how we get a faster way of getting the information to the public and collaborating with stakeholders? Those were four big areas that the recommendations addressed, and I wonder if you're going to address this when we get there, because this is a really severe problem. People could die. Fortunately, people only got sick, but people could die from E. coli or listeriosis or salmonella, any one of the things that we can find in foods. Now that it's turned over to Health Canada, we should be better able to deal with this in an appropriate and effective manner.
Can you tell me whether you are going to look at those recommendations or not?