Veterans Affairs committee  It's true that we do not have a registry of people who have taken mefloquine. We don't have a formal process by which we're tracking people as a group.

Veterans Affairs committee  As I mentioned earlier, we have an electronic health record and we can access information in that health record, but what we don't have is a specific registry of people, a list of names with their symptoms and tests done.

Veterans Affairs committee  The place we could access that is through the system I mentioned earlier, which we've had in place for perhaps 10 years. I don't remember the exact date.

Veterans Affairs committee  I believe we can do that. Certainly we could go through each person, but I'm not sure whether we could just do a data extraction and come up with a list. I'm not 100% sure of that, but I suspect it's possible.

Veterans Affairs committee  Certainly I could look into that.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'd just like to clarify a point, and that is that, when we prescribe it to somebody now, it's either because the other anti-malarials are contraindicated or it's because they have chosen to and have taken it before without having significant symptoms. It has sort of been tested,

Veterans Affairs committee  The Canadian Forces is not actively involved in research regarding mefloquine. We are engaged in all sorts of mental health research projects that would certainly be of benefit to all patients who may have—

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm not aware of the information that you provided from Australia. I've never read in any report anything about 14 conditions being diagnosed down there. I don't know, Colonel Jetly, if you've heard of that, but this is—

Veterans Affairs committee  We'd certainly be very interested to see that.

Veterans Affairs committee  The process is a little bit different for veterans versus serving members because the Canadian Forces runs its own health system, whereas veterans get their care through the civilian health system.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'll tell you about the serving members. For serving members who are concerned about their symptoms and wondering if they may be related to mefloquine, they need to see one of their health care providers—whether that's a physician or a psychologist or what have you—in order to st

Veterans Affairs committee  We wanted to have it still in our formulary for cases where the other drugs were contraindicated. If somebody was allergic to the other medications, for example, we still wanted to have this as a possibility. We do prefer to prescribe the others should they not be contraindicated

Veterans Affairs committee  When you say “compensated”, are you referring to Veterans Affairs compensation?

Veterans Affairs committee  Right. There would be different ways people could be compensated for that. One would be through litigation, but there would be the other way, which is through Veterans Affairs. I'll invite Dr. Courchesne to speak to that.

Veterans Affairs committee  I can tell you that even back in the 1990s I had a patient who believed his symptoms were related to mefloquine—