National Defence committee  I regret, sir, but I'm not in a position to give you any detailed figures.

National Defence committee  I can try, but it's not necessarily easy.

National Defence committee  Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for this opportunity to appear once again, this time to address the Auditor General's report on military health care. I am sorry I am not mentally agile enough to have incorporated any more details about some of those excellent questions in my opening remarks, but I am sure many of them will be brought out during the question period.

National Defence committee  I could go back to my force health protection staff and get that to you.

National Defence committee  I've been told that Christmas is coming.

National Defence committee  We have some money that.... It's going to look ugly. We need an interim fix, because new construction is going to take three to five years by the time you get through all the work that needs to be done to build something properly, so we are looking at a short-term infusion, whether it's trailer rentals or....

National Defence committee  That's still accurate; it's 16% to 17% for hazardous drinking and all the other categories.

National Defence committee  If the committee is interested in specific figures, I can make those available.

National Defence committee  Actually, I'm glad you brought that up, because if you look at our mix of providers, in fact we have almost a two to one ratio of clinical psychologists over psychiatrists. Both disciplines are involved in the assessment. They both participate in the assessment of the patient--in making the diagnosis--and then the treatment will depend on who is best placed.

National Defence committee  We certainly have our cases of traumatic brain injury, but I would advise you to.... If you take a careful look at the very recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine, what it says is not that post-traumatic stress disorder isn't really post-traumatic stress disorder, but really MTBI.

National Defence committee  There's nothing particularly classified about the public health measures taken in preparation for Afghanistan. They're fairly routine. The risks we watch out for there are primarily arthropod-borne ones. We have the normal immunizations, but the acute risks are arthropod-borne malaria and leishmaniasis.

National Defence committee  Oh, there are certainly a lot of people who have vaccine-related concerns, and we perhaps have to do a better job of explaining the science to people, because the biggest public health fear I have is that people will be too reluctant to accept vaccination when it is in fact the most prudent way to go, from both a personal health and a public health point of view.

National Defence committee  You can get over it. In fact, the best treatment now.... It's not the case that you're going to be on the couch for three years, telling your psychiatrist everything you know for three hours a week; the maximum is about 20 sessions if you're going to get results out of cognitive behavioural therapy.

National Defence committee  That is a very interesting constellation of questions, and, again, I apologize for answering in English, but I'll be more efficient this way. Chaplains, in fact, are part of our OTSSC multidisciplinary team. It's one of our leading-edge practices that we employ pastoral counsellors in our OTSSCs as full members of the team.

National Defence committee  The Afghan National Army has built a new hospital in what they call Camp Hero, which is just outside the gate of the main Kandahar airfield base, and we're doing a lot of work with them. We're also doing some work with the public health authorities in Kandahar city to help them with health prevention.