Health committee  Thanks for the question. I think Canada is one of the better-prepared countries in the world to deal with emerging infectious diseases. It's partly because of the laboratory in Winnipeg, but also because of the Public Health Agency in general and our international connections.

Health committee  Maybe I'll start and just tell you about some of the things we're doing at the federal level to coordinate response capability across departments. The Public Health Agency, through the National Microbiology Laboratory, provides biological support to the national nuclear, biolog

Health committee  I'll try that one first. The legislation concerning level 3 and level 4 pathogens is absolutely required. And if people are not meeting the standards there, they shouldn't be working on those organisms because of the risk to the laboratory workers and also because of the risk to

Health committee  Yes, I'd be happy to. In my testimony on Tuesday before the committee I mentioned that when I initially looked at what was being proposed in the bill, I had many of the same concerns. I've been reassured and convinced by my colleagues in, I would say, rather vigorous discussion

Health committee  I think we were aware there would be concerns around some of those things. The scientists who work with me in the national microbiology lab have expressed those kinds of concerns. But if you have a very limited licence, as Theresa just described, I don't see that as being onerous

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Mr. Chair, I would ask the committee members to have a look at this chart, which was distributed just before we began. What it shows is a plot of the number of listeria monocytogenes isolates over the months of June, July, and August that we dealt with at the national microbiol

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  It's the Canadian Network for Public Health Intelligence.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  We've been working with a system we call PulseNet, which is basically a virtual laboratory spread across the country. For about 10 years, we have been gradually improving it and expanding its scope. We began with E. coli 0157:H7 and then moved on to salmonella, because the vast m

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Thank you for the question. The time we consider something a red alert is when we see a significant number of related cases. In this listeria outbreak, which occurred August 12, we identified a number of different listeria strains from Ontario with identical fingerprints, or ve

Health committee  Yes, I can.

Health committee  That's correct.

Health committee  Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the committee. My name is Frank Plummer and I'm an infectious disease physician and an HIV researcher. As you've heard, I'm a scientific director of the Public Health Agency's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, and

Health committee  Certainly, Madam Chair. In our experience at the National Microbiology Lab we have developed a number of candidate vaccines for viral hemorrhagic fevers. We have in fact had no problem identifying manufacturing capacity for trial lots. There are many U.S. and European companies

Health committee  Madam Chair, let me start by saying that I was as disappointed as anyone with the turn of events related to the CHVI, but I am quite excited by the opportunity that we have before us, in that the Gates Foundation is continuing in its commitment to this initiative, as is the Gover

Health committee  Certainly. Madam Chair, I've been involved in HIV research since pretty much the beginnings of the HIV pandemic. I was working in Kenya when it became apparent that there was a huge problem with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Much of our work in the early days described the emergenc