There are a number of things. I mentioned GEF and the global intelligence network we operate. In retrospect, an early version of that before it was really operational picked up SARS in November, months before it broke out of China. Now we notify WHO and the affected country, and they can then deal with an issue earlier on. Plus, the addition of the international health regulations that put the onus on countries in terms of containing issues within their borders would allow things to be dealt with in the tens and hundreds, rather than in the thousands and tens of thousands.
Secondly, we have capacity, for example, for Ebola in Congo. We have a portable laboratory capacity that nobody else in the world has, and we've sent it to Vietnam, to Congo; it was at the Olympics in Beijing and it will be at the Olympics in Canada, with the ability to diagnose in the field some of the worst and most difficult nasty diseases so you know what you're dealing with. We have teams we send to those parts of the world to support the WHO and others in that work.
Also, there is the development of the public health network. Before there were many advisory committees across multiple FPT4, etc. Now that all comes to one place, where work plans, planning, etc., is jointly done with the provinces and territories. We review where the gaps are. We can do the kind of planning that's needed. If there are policy issues that need to come up to the deputies or on to ministers, we have a means to do that. Everything then is connected, and there are roles and responsibilities in the response to outbreaks, the chief medical officer's role, the minister's role. We do scenario planning and we also do testing of these things, for example, around a pandemic.
Canada was the first country to have a national pandemic plan for the health sector. Other countries have copied that and built on it. We have other things, like vaccine contracts, anti-virals, etc., to mitigate that. But it's an all-hazards approach, because the work we do is not simply looking at any one disease, like a pandemic of influenza. What if there were another SARS? There are many examples, but I'll give you one from last May.
We got notice on a Friday morning that there was a train in northern Ontario with a number of Asian tourists on it who were sick. One had died and one was airlifted. Within minutes we had our operation centre operating, but within hours, with the province, the local public health office, fire, and others, with VIA Rail, other departments of the federal government, we were able to figure out exactly what was going on. Fortunately, it was a series of unhappy coincidences: they were Australian tourists, they had colds, and the woman died of a pulmonary embolism. It was not the next SARS. But if it had been the next SARS, everything happened exactly the way I would hope it would happen.