Health committee  Carolyn, it comes back to the three As I mentioned: availability, affordability, and accountability. I think it's very important that Health Canada develop processes, such as products like yttrium and lutetium, or that other medications be approved based on European clinical tria

Health committee  A good example is that last week a company requested that a generator be imported to Canada from Israel. It was denied by one branch of Health Canada. They sent the company to the special access program. The special access program is limited to physicians, not to companies. So ba

Health committee  I have a very quick comment. I think federal leadership is critical. Let me give you the example of London, Ontario, which has a neuroendocrine tumour program that patients were going to from everywhere in Canada. Now it's prohibited from doing that. We cannot see patients from o

Health committee  Megan, this is also a very good question. We love acronyms in medicine, so I'm going to use two of them. One is PPPT, which is for predict, prevent, pinpoint, and treat. One is the predictions biomarkers, the prevention is basically genetic counselling, the pinpointing is diag

Health committee  Carolyn, I think you're absolutely right. This is a unique opportunity for Canada. The way I see it, the unique opportunity is coming from the fact, as Gail said, that they call them genetic diseases. We are in the era of the personalized human genome project and personalized m

Health committee  Yes. That's exactly the point. When you deal with cardiovascular disease or cancer, you can generate data very quickly. When you deal with rare disorders--and Durhane mentioned those numbers are in your information—it's virtually impossible. At the same time, we feel very bad for

Health committee  Colin, this is the key question. That's a very good question. Let me try to frame this. You know we have been dealing with a major isotope crisis of molybdenum and technetium; they're 80% of the isotopes we use in nuclear medicine. Rare disorders need rare isotopes. It's very di

Health committee  Good morning. My name is Jean-Luc Urbain. I am the president of the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine. I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me once again to testify on rare disorders and medical isotopes. We have significant issues, besides the big issue we have b

Health committee  I have two points. The first is that medical isotopes are produced by research reactors, so the first goal of those reactors is to do research. We should not lose sight of this. If we don't have a reactor to do research, this entire aspect of research technology would disappear.

Health committee  I fully agree with Dr. Doig. The picture or analogy I can use is this. In 2009 none of us would like to drive a car from 1960. If you have to get from point A to point B and you have nothing else, that's what you use, but all of us would like the 2010 model.

Health committee  I'll make a brief comment. I beg to differ with Dr. McEwan about the relevancy of the CIHR-funded project. One question we might want to ask ourselves is that.... We spent $6 million on a project that clearly will not yield anything within two years, where we probably should hav

Health committee  It's a very complex crisis. You heard from Dr. Patrick Bourguet that it's affecting the entire world. I think the crux of the question is really the supply of isotopes across the world. Canada was producing 40% for the rest of the world and suddenly it went down to zero. As you k

Health committee  I think you are absolutely correct. The issue is that technetium will not disappear any time soon. Technology exists. You don't go from 80% technetium usage to 0%, even in five years. The problem is a lack of foresight by Canada over the past 20 years, and I mean Canada in the

Health committee  We've basically been active at the level of Health Canada. In January of this year, our association was sent to Paris. There was a delegation from Canada led by Serge Dupont from NRCan. I'm not totally sure there is a direct line of communication between the CANM, NRCan, and th

Health committee  Not that I'm aware of.