Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  I'd actually like to defer this question to the director general of medical devices, who's here today. She has a lot more experience with this, and I'd ask her to come to the table and respond to that question.

Environment committee  I probably misspoke. It's something that we very often do. It's just something that is not a legally binding kind of thing. So you ask people to come to the table and you hope that they get there, but you might have to encourage them along. So it's the issue of giving some time

Environment committee  It's important to realize that this particular issue of bringing together hospital associations and health practitioners' professional health associations—doctors, nurses, people who work in critical care areas—is somewhat beyond the jurisdiction of the federal government. We wou

Environment committee  Yes. This is a very difficult technical area to work in—

Environment committee  —but we use as much science as we have available on cumulative effects, and we will factor that into the reassessment.

Environment committee  I can't give you a technical term related to that, but it's starting to look at any synergistic effects or any additive effects, or it could be not additive effects but subtractive effects—that's not quite the right word. It's looking at whether there is any interaction between t

Environment committee  More time to do that, which is a bit of a new and emerging area in science.

Environment committee  It is a paper assessment. There might be some situations, but we will not likely go out and do a new research project that could take two or three years. We will be looking at the information that's out there. That said, to collect all that information, to understand it, to talk

Environment committee  We would prefer the 24 months. We want to do a good job on this. We want to have the right peer review that would normally be taken with something like that, so we would not like to do a rush job. We would like to have the extra time to be able to do a good job, because obvious

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  Essentially what we do with the assessments is bring together all of the available scientific data that is there. Sometimes we have to go and get new information, but usually we use what we have, and then we will make a judgment with what the new information is. I believe these w

Environment committee  This particular version--and I think it was left over from a discussion that we were going to have on Tuesday--actually would perhaps force us at the end of the six-year period to lose access to very valuable medical devices because we have not been able to do the safety assessme

Environment committee  I think it's not a matter of one individual medical device; it's a safety assessment for every application that we're trying to remove. There is a whole range of products out there, so it's not that we can do something in a period of time; it's finding the right alternative that

Environment committee  This is beyond the scope. I cannot give you a sense of it until we can move to an environment where we're completely free of DEHP in medical devices. We've heard from some of the other witnesses that they're essential in blood bags, and I know we've talked about that. But I can't