Mr. Speaker, beneath the rhetoric that you are hearing today lurks a very, very serious issue. The member opposite has asked why members of this party have changed their attitude toward giving patent protection to drugs, why they have changed their position in 10 years.
I can tell her why they have changed their position in 10 years. It is that in 10 years there has been an enormous advance in antibiotic resistant bacteria. The classic case is tuberculosis. We now have a strain of tuberculosis out there that is resistant to every known antibiotic but one. There is a great number of these old diseases that have developed resistance to the drugs that we counted upon in the past. Much of this has occurred in the last 10 years. What is happening is that we have to, as a government, do everything in our power to encourage private industry or anyone else to develop new drugs to resist these diseases that have developed resistance to the antibiotics that we have had to date.
This is a serious problem. It is a deadly problem, Mr. Speaker. It is a problem in the scientific and biological communities. They regard it with great trepidation. If we do not do something very quickly about it, if we do not develop new drugs as fast as possible by encouraging the incentives of the marketplace, we are going to be in a lot of trouble and some people, and I do not want to sound overly dramatic, are going to die. We actually have to develop new drugs and if we have to encourage manufacturers by extending the patent protection law, then we had better do it.