Health committee  I think the challenge with CARSS, although it's a very good initial step, is that it's not comprehensive and does not feel the pulse of all the places where health care is being delivered. Not only do we need to know about teaching hospitals where there's a problem, but we also

Health committee  I'll give you the example of children with an ear infection in the Netherlands and the Nordic countries.

Health committee  They are observed for 48 hours before giving them antibiotics. In Canada, however, the reflex is to give them antibiotics because an ear infection can sometimes cause meningitis, and the infection, if undiagnosed, can lead to many long-term complications. To avoid a single possib

Health committee  It could have an effect. I read the record of the testimonies of people from the veterinarian society who appeared before the committee. They said that it wasn't common here and that veterinarians avoided using antibiotics without a good reason. According to these testimonies, t

Health committee  Sometimes there is no vaccination against a given infection. I'm thinking of bacterial infections in hospitalized patients. We don't yet have a vaccination against the harmful pathogens I've described.

Health committee  First of all, we need a good monitoring system. It all starts with that. Right now, we don't have the numbers that would indicate where we're at. The second challenge is the fact that we are a litigious society. Many of those who consult a doctor don't want to argue with the doc

Health committee  We haven't progressed much in the federal system either. We have good labs that collect good data. We have some community labs, private labs, that publish resistance rates, like LifeLabs in Ontario, but we don't have a national clearing house, which should also have local data, b

Health committee  This old wives' tale, if I can call it that, has been somewhat demystified in the last year—the idea that when you get an antibiotic course, you have to finish it. You have to take the whole course. We now know there is no evidence for that, and people are encouraging shorter-cou

Health committee  In that case I was referring to community-associated MRSA. It really hasn't changed much, now that you raise it. People know it's out there. They'll have their own experience as physicians in obtaining a culture and seeing there's a bit of drug resistance out there. What they don

Health committee  There is truth to the link between farm use of antibiotics for animal husbandry purposes and drug resistance, but I don't think it applies so much to Canada. In Europe it was definitely observed, especially with the emergence of vancomycin-resistant enterococci, which, as it turn

Health committee  I don't want this to turn into airport screening. That's for sure, and I will say that at the outset, but there is a form of screening we are doing for hospital-admitted patients who fit certain risk factors. It is not simply visitors. It's true that visitors who come into the ho

Health committee  First of all, Kuwait has a big drug resistance problem, in part because drugs have been overused, and it's the same thing on the Indian subcontinent. You even have antibiotics ending up in fresh water that people are consuming. This is one of the big risks when antibiotics-laden

Health committee  I'll answer that first, but I'm sure Dr. Shevchuk will have other comments. I sat on the committee to evaluate drugs for Ontario. It oversees the Ontario drug benefit formulary, so I'm quite aware of this problem. I'll speak a bit to procalcitonin testing, which is not somethin

Health committee  Thank you very much for your time and attention.

Health committee  The so-called “superbugs” that we should be worried about are almost all Gram-negative bugs. This is where we have the shortage of antibiotics. We've run out of oral antibiotics in many cases, as I cited. The high-priority bugs are generally food safety issues. If we have a good