Health committee  Good morning. I have speaking notes, but I won't necessarily read from them. I want to provide a bit of context about where I'm coming from. I have had Lyme, and like many others I had to seek treatment in the United States to return to health. In this case I'm speaking as a s

Health committee  I would like to have a specific question to find out why it is that NSERC and SSHRC are not included as partners. I completely agree with you that CIHR is a wonderful partner; however, their mandate is only a small part of this problem, and by not having the natural scientists an

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  Well, I'll answer that indirectly. When we do work with mice, the way we produce infected mice is that we innoculate them with blood, usually from another mouse. That's mice, not humans, but we all have blood and it works the same way. There is no reason it would not happen. Th

Health committee  So, yes.

Health committee  There is science to say that it can be found in human genital secretions. It has been shown to be sexually transmitted in a number of different animals—dogs, horses for some reason, cats, and mice. There are also studies that failed to document it, but I think at this point the p

Health committee  We need to bring the patient voice into it, because the current framework was written by the people who basically brought us to this position in the first place, and it endorses the status quo. That's not the situation we're facing in Canada. Jennifer and Sue have described what

Health committee  No, it doesn't. It provides no opportunity for input, or even for updating the science. We need a way of feeding in new scientific discoveries as they happen, and they're happening very rapidly. There is, essentially, no dialogue. There's no way to make this a living document.

Health committee  No scientist is ever going to say, “That's enough money”, but perhaps I'll—

Health committee  I might actually break tradition there. I would say that it depends on how you are going to use the money. If it's more of the same, I don't think that's a very good use of the budget whatsoever. Canadian scientists are very good at scraping along with relatively little money, a

Health committee  The conference brought together patients and scientists and medical professionals. At the end of the conference, there was a conference summary. If you go to the online version of the framework it's hyperlinked there. The summary couldn't capture all of those testimonials, but ke

Health committee  I can keep going, but I don't think we want to do that.

Health committee  It will not unless.... We already have a surveillance system. We have to fix it and bring together all the people who think of different ways to do surveillance, as opposed to just doing more of the same thing.

Health committee  If it were to be different, I would think that would be indicated in the document by saying that this is something different we can do to help Canadians as opposed to making a general statement that we'll do something.

Health committee  I can't give you specifics, not off the top of my head, but I will give you examples. Depending on which public health website you look at, you will read that the tick must be attached for either 24, 48, or 72 hours in order to transmit the disease. There are, however, reports s