Health committee  At the risk of offending my colleagues to the right--I'm just teasing--of course the work we're doing needs more funding, and there is opportunity to use both a spontaneous reporting system and a targeted surveillance system to identify drug reactions of concern and, most importa

Health committee  Avoiding the essential what...? I'm not sure I understand the last part of your question.

Health committee  Exactly. For the most part, the comments you make are accurate. The issue is what specifically puts individual patients at risk of a serious reaction. If there are genetic variants in certain individuals that put them at risk, they could be responsible for many of the reactions t

Health committee  We don't have enough funding to do all of the work we could do. We're working in a very small environment now. We're working in children's hospitals across the country on very specific targeted therapies, we're looking at reactions that have been in existence for a long time that

Health committee  The backbone is being created. A number of countries are interested in this in the European Union, of course, and in United States and Canada. International cooperation is important to progress, and we can divide and conquer these particular problems independently as well. There

Health committee  Exactly.

Health committee  Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the committee. Thank you again for the opportunity to speak to you. I would like to reiterate a couple of brief points that I made the last time, but I won't dwell on those. I'm hoping that you read the transcript of comments instead. Th

Health committee  It's a worthwhile goal; it's a worthwhile thing to pursue. The difficulty is resourcing this, because physicians, pharmacists, and nurses report the information they think you need to know. The four hours to put together one cysplatin case comes from experience and looking at man

Health committee  The holy grail of pharmacogenomics would be to determine alternative drugs or different doses of the same medication that should be used, based upon the patient's own genetic profile and how they process the drug. The difficulty in getting there, though, is still a problem. Even

Health committee  My comment is that mandatory surveillance is great in concept but very poor in execution. It's very difficult. How are you going to regulate it? How will you know if somebody didn't report? How are you going to enforce it? The difficulty for physicians, nurses, and pharmacists i

Health committee  We can train physicians and nurses and pharmacists to do their reporting. In the United States, where MedWatch came in with great fervour that it would increase reporting in 1996, in 1997 there was a 50% increase in adverse drug reaction reporting as a result of the online regist

Health committee  Sure. Good questions. There are two points. One is the incomplete nature of reporting, and the other is the quality of the reports, which is what we're talking about. So the first is incomplete reporting. Why don't people report? There are lots of reasons that people have cited

Health committee  I'll start, and then I'll let you comment, Madeline. Very quickly, I've spent a lot of time working with Health Canada, many years, and also the provincial governments. I have been profoundly shocked, perhaps, on the lack of progress in many issues. We seem to have the same mee

Health committee  Sure. I'll start this time. On the issue of other jurisdictions, in the United States the National Institutes of Health has a program called the pediatric pharmacology research units, or PPRUs. These were a result of modernization of the food and drug regulations, the FDAMA, the

Health committee  I meant that you'll be following science. The science is there, and it's already been done. Warfarin genetic testing is being done now. Carbamazepine, a very well-used and well-accepted anti-seizure medication also used in some mental disorders, has a genetic test available to pr