Health committee  You track an organism; then you may see a blip one day, whereby it's going up. You know at that point that you have to really focus. What is actually going on? You get your whole HACCP team in the plant to take a very aggressive look. Is this an issue? There are plants we've spoken to recently that have meetings every day to discuss lab results.

Health committee  Yes, it's actually specifically to the food.

Health committee  There are foods you wouldn't necessarily want to add to. As Dr. Butler-Jones was mentioning about a risk-based system, you want to focus on those foods that have previously been involved in listeria outbreaks. For example, deli meats are obviously high-risk. You would want to add something like sodium diacetate to them to inhibit...but there are other foods that you cannot add to, because of their flavour characteristics.

Health committee  No, there is no correlation. The main thing with listeria, just so you understand, from all the risk assessments that have been done is that you really need to have fairly good growth of the organism to reach levels that actually cause disease. For example, let's say a listeria cell fell on a raspberry.

Health committee  There are a number of other options, and we always like to say that we provide an outcome-based approach. Obviously, industry has the main responsibility for producing safe food. We set the standards. We say, for example, that we want them to produce food that has listeria absent in a certain amount of product.

Health committee  Thank you very much. Just to add to what Ms. Ballantyne said, as I mentioned before, we've already seen changes in the meat industry. For example, there are companies that are using ultra-high pressure to inactivate listeria. There are other companies that are using inhibitors to actually inhibit the growth so it never gets to a level that can cause disease.

Health committee  I have not been directly involved in the meat hygiene manual. But definitely, as Ms. Ballantyne mentioned, there are directions in our listeria policy that are being thought of for use in the meat hygiene manual. There are also a number of other policies that will be coming up.

Health committee  Thank you very much for the question. Just to start off, the main focus of the listeria policy is on prevention and early detection. The proposed changes that we've made to the policy will encourage early identification of contamination in the plant environment. This would help take corrective actions earlier and help avoid contamination of the finished product.

Health committee  Yes. It's root cause analysis: you do sampling, let's say, of the environment, to find out where it is, and once you find that it is there, you take steps to eliminate it. We've made a number of changes to the overall policy from the previous 2004 policy. I can give you just a few examples.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  It's very complex. When you have a clinical sample like blood or cerebral spinal fluid, usually you have the organism in a pure culture, so it's very easy to isolate. When you have a food, the food itself is complex, plus you have many, many different types of bacteria in the food.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Yes. This is part of our lessons learned, in terms of samples and where they're going. Historically, they've always come into our lab, and that's what happened in this case.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Thank you, honourable member. In terms of the samples, you may have heard of the listeriosis reference service that's operated jointly between Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada. Over a number of years, we have provided a service to the Ontario labs of analyzing food samples that come in for suspected cases of listeriosis.