Madam Speaker, I am very pleased on behalf of the NDP to join in on the debate on the motion put forward by the member for Yellowhead. I thank him for recognizing that a very similar motion was put forward in the first session of the 37th Parliament by the NDP health critic, the member for Winnipeg North Centre.
We certainly share the hon. member's very real concern over this issue. We recognize that the motion tries to address a question of health of very real and timely pertinence to all Canadians. It seeks to ensure that the medications that people are required to take because of illness are in fact safe beyond a reasonable doubt.
The motion is very simple and very straightforward, as the best motions often are. It calls upon the government, in cooperation with the provincial and territorial governments I should add, to put in place a system of mandatory reporting of adverse drug reactions.
Many of us were shocked to learn in investigating this issue that it is estimated that approximately 10,000 people a year die of adverse drug reactions in Canada. I do not think any of us are naive enough to think that by putting this registry in place we would prevent all 10,000 deaths per year, but it is safe to say that we could prevent a significant number of them if we took proactive, concrete steps to introduce a systematic way of sharing the information on adverse reactions.
Like so many things, I think a lot of Canadians believe that such a system is already in place in Canada. Many would be surprised to learn what a disorderly system is currently in place.
I should back up for a second and point out that Health Canada started to keep track of adverse reactions of drugs in the 1960s. The database was set up after women who had been taking the drug thalidomide gave birth to babies with serious birth defects, as many of us of the right age will remember. Health officials worldwide had noticed the problem too late, tragically. They vowed collectively it would never happen again. A database was put together and was started in this country, but researchers have been having a difficult time finding out what is in that database, how it is structured and how that information is in fact used.
When we did finally get to the bottom of it in researching this database, we found that there are 162,000 records of Canadians who have had a bad reaction to prescription drugs. Data in and of itself is meaningless until it can be analyzed and shared and used. This stockpile of incidents is not satisfactory in terms of having a mandatory adverse reaction registry that can be shared and can be accessed by all doctors and pharmacists.
One of the things that really turned a lot of heads when this research was done was that the number of adverse reactions among Canadians has absolutely skyrocketed in recent years. Among children in the last five years the number of serious incidents has tripled. That in and of itself should motivate Parliament to take action.
Again, I compliment the member for Yellowhead for being the one to champion this issue in the House of Commons because I was shocked to learn that Health Canada obviously is missing some of these vital signals.
One of the reasons the rate of adverse reactions in children has tripled and is growing much more quickly than in adults is that often there is off-label use of the drugs and the drugs were never tested on children. They were not really designed and meant for children.
A ridiculous example is that Viagra is being given to children who have serious lung problems to open up the cardiovascular capacity in their lungs. It was never intended for that use.
Pediatricians are in fact using drugs, what is called off-label use of drugs, more and more and there have been serious incidents of adverse reactions. The number of incidents has tripled over the last five years. We need no other reasons frankly, but if that were the only reason to introduce the mandatory adverse reaction registry, it would be enough for me to hold up my hand to vote for its introduction right away.
For many of us the issue crystallized when we learned of the well-publicized death of a young girl in Oakville, Ontario, Vanessa Young. She was 15 years old. She died because the drug she was prescribed, Prepulsid, was prescribed for the wrong circumstances. By all accounts this was a preventable death. Her father, Terence Young, to whom we should pay tribute, has carried on a mission since his daughter's passing to ensure that we as a society learn a valuable lesson from Vanessa's death. Surely that should compel us to take action today; that father's suffering and that family's suffering for an unnecessary and preventable death of a young Canadian girl, what more reason do we need.
We certainly became much more aware of the problems associated with adverse drug reactions and the absence of any substantive policy in this area as a result of Vanessa's death. We owe it to her to ensure that her death was not in vain, that we learn lessons from this tragedy. We must ensure that people in similar circumstances are not affected by something that is so preventable, so easy to grasp and so relatively easy to implement, in fact. We are not looking at a huge cost factor, as the mover of the motion pointed out.
At that time, the member for Winnipeg North Centre, the NDP health critic, raised with the House of Commons that Health Canada had information that it could have shared and acted upon many months before the death of Vanessa Young, but it failed to do so. It was not compelled to do so. The information was housed in a warehouse of information with 162,000 incidents. It did not constitute a database; it constituted a pile of information, essentially. There was no easy way for pediatricians, family doctors or pharmacists to research recent experience with certain pharmaceutical products.
The point of today's debate is not to lay blame but to find solutions. As a result of Vanessa's death, there was a coroner's inquest. The jury made a number of recommendations. One was the mandatory reporting of adverse drug reactions within 48 hours of the incident taking place. That seems to be a very reasonable solution to a very serious problem and one for which there is no reason to delay and no reason to avoid action.
I was disappointed to hear the rather vapid approach by the parliamentary secretary on the government side who spoke to this issue. I honestly thought that we would hear a more enthusiastic approach. What would be wrong for the Liberal government to stand up and say to the member for Yellowhead that he is right, that we should do something about this? The Liberals would not lose any political points for admitting that this is a shortfall in our health care system. They would gain political points for leaving their political baggage at the door for once in their lives and for doing what was right for Canadians in this regard.
I welcome the opportunity to throw my enthusiastic support behind the member for Yellowhead on this initiative, and the support of the entire, massive NDP caucus, as many votes as we can muster. We will be voting in favour of this initiative.
It is a pleasure to end the week on a note of doing something that would be good for Canadians were this motion allowed to go through to its natural conclusion.