Absolutely. Thank you.
Thank you to the translator for being so good. I know I speak quickly.
Just to set the stage, antibiotic resistance occurs when a type of bacteria that we were able to treat with a regular antibiotic is not treatable any more. In some countries, we're seeing more and more death associated with it because a urinary tract infection, which is something quite common, could be non-treatable and lead to death, which should not be seen nowadays.
The policy steps that have been taken and that we still need to keep on taking include, first of all, having data on what antibiotics are being used and what antibiotic resistance we're seeing with various infections. Again, as Dr. Nuyt was saying, it's not that easy to have access to data across the country.
There are a few programs that exist at the federal level. CNISP is one of those programs. It looks at nosocomial infections or health care-associated infections. We're able to follow antibiotic use and antimicrobial resistance. However, this program is limited to only 65 hospitals out of the 600-and-something that exist in Canada, so again, as Anne Monique said, particularly in pediatrics, if we want to have data that we're able to compare to, we need something that is national and not just provincial. That is the first step.
The second step, when we're talking about One Health, means that whatever you use or you see in animals will eventually end up in humans, whether that be through food or through close exposure. When we see antibiotic-resistant organisms arise in, let's say, chicken farms, it's very possible that people who are close to those chickens will acquire those organisms. Eventually there will be transmission between humans and we won't be able to treat those any more, so surveillance in both the veterinary world and the human world is necessary, and we really need to have the possibility to do genomics to understand if one strain is related to another or not.
At this point in time, these programs exist, but they are in specialized laboratories, in public health laboratories. We need to have better access to those and make sure that those programs are well funded across the country at the federal level and in the provinces, as well as in the national microbiology lab.
The last thing is to promote innovation in terms of new antibiotics. You are not going to see a lot of new antibiotics come up. Manufacturers and pharmaceutical industries are not tempted to put new antibiotics out on the market. It costs them a lot of money. It's labour intensive. Again, when a new antibiotic comes out, the last population that has access to it is pediatrics, so that's coming around to what Dr. Nuyt was saying in terms of the availability of drugs.