Veterans Affairs committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the use of mefloquine as a medication to prevent malaria in the Canadian Armed Forces. As you know, malaria is one of the world's most significant infe

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you. I'll start by trying to provide an answer to the question prior to passing it on to my colleagues. One of the purposes of doing screening is to be able to do something about it. The current situation is that, although we could ask questions about what people did or d

Veterans Affairs committee  I would say that humans all have bias. On the issue of confirmation bias, I'm not quite sure what you're referring to there. I presume you're referring to the fact that we have a hypothesis on the table and that people are looking to confirm their hypothesis. Is that what you're

Veterans Affairs committee  I can't really answer that question. It's quite possible that this is the case. I think when you look at all the studies that are being done and reports that are being generated, there are biases, a number of different kinds of biases. I do think there is a desire among some to p

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't think those questions really confirm anything. One of the problems is recall bias as well. We know that people often confound the different medications that they've been given, and sometimes that's one of the criticisms of surveys that are conducted after the fact. Howeve

Veterans Affairs committee  Perhaps I'll ask Dr. Jetly to answer that question.

Veterans Affairs committee  That report is from a number of years ago. It was ordered by my predecessor. Although I've read the report a number of times, I don't remember the specific numbers and what it said. I do know that when we looked at it, we found there were a number of people who were prescribed m

Veterans Affairs committee  I'd like to respond to a number of different elements. The first one is that quinism is not a recognized diagnosis. It doesn't exist in the manual of diagnoses that we use when we're coding things. It is also a hypothesis, and Dr. Nevin refers to it himself as a hypothesis. A

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a challenge. Trying to attribute an outcome to an incident or to a medication can be very difficult. When one looks at anecdotes, at single cases or groups of single cases, one might easily overlook other factors that might be at play. When we were speaking a bit earlier—

Veterans Affairs committee  I suppose it depends on when and where the mission was.

Veterans Affairs committee  Somalia: I was a student in those days and not working in the system at that time, so I don't know exactly what took place. From what I have read, screenings weren't done in that sense. There wasn't a check, a questionnaire that was filled out by serving members, but the expectat

Veterans Affairs committee  Almost certainly it would be on base. I suppose it's possible that some were filled in a civilian pharmacy, but they would have typically been on base, either in a pharmacy or through a regimental unit medical station.

Veterans Affairs committee  I certainly don't know about that. I don't know if anybody else does.

Veterans Affairs committee  Certainly anti-malarials have been provided for a fairly significant period of time, certainly predating mefloquine. We can't really speak to given missions at this point, but we do know that doxycycline had been used, and chloroquine was used in certain areas where the malaria i

Veterans Affairs committee  I'll ask Colonel Jetly to speak to that. He is quite engaged with the international community.