Agriculture committee  TB is a reportable disease, and it's also a listed disease with the OIE. We're only required to report through the OIE to the world on a six-month basis. However, we also let our immediate trading partners know how we're carrying out the investigation. In order to be proactive li

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the question. We have two programs. First, we have a passive monitoring program. When their productive life is over, dairy cows are sent to the abattoir. We also have a post-mortem detection program. Since the frequency of infection cases is really very low, we do

Agriculture committee  Traceability is different from one sector to another. Certain sectors are at a given stage, which may not be the same in other sectors. In Canada, the traceability process is not the same everywhere. We are in fact setting up a process to modernize traceability regulations. We wi

Agriculture committee  Canada is one of the rare countries that has managed to almost completely eliminate bovine tuberculosis in all of the herds, nationally. People know that it is normal that there be a few cases every two or three years. When we tell those countries that we are conducting a complet

Agriculture committee  No, that's not it. The 2016 case was in Alberta, and today we have a first case in British Columbia. There were cases in 2011, but they were in another location also.

Agriculture committee  We have been working on the timeline of the animal's life. All I can say at this point in time is that the animal may have stopped at a few different stops, mostly at the auction marts and the loading stations. There may be some farms involved, but we don't know exactly where thi

Agriculture committee  Yes, that is the most contagious phase. If the animal has inhaled or ingested the bacteria, the bacteria will go into the animal. The way that it works is that the bacteria tries to insulate itself from the immune system of the animal, so it starts making an envelope of layers ar

Agriculture committee  As I said, there's also a public health issue. We've worked in Canada since 1923 to eradicate bovine TB from Canada because when we have to treat an animal or a human being with antibiotics it's a long treatment. Sometimes it could be six months to a year, with heavy doses of ant

Agriculture committee  It's hard to verify in this bacteria because it is so hard to grow in the lab. Looking at the resistance by doing what we call an antibiogram is very difficult. We can look, but I don't have the data right now on whether Mycobacterium bovis is actually resistant to antibiotics. G

Agriculture committee  It is quite possible. However, our colleagues—not CFIA but the provincial governments—actually have surveillance programs. In this case, the B.C. government has decided to do a surveillance of these farms and see if there are any cases of bovine TB. At this time, and even last

Agriculture committee  Yes, we do. We want to make sure that, as much as we are ready, the producer, the owner is also ready. As I said in my opening remarks, we cannot just go and say that we're going to test and then start culling all these cattle. We have to have discussions with the owner about the

Agriculture committee  We found out, as I said, the complexity of the problem last time. We were communicating at a different level, learning from the avian influenza issue, but we found out that we were dealing with a cattle issue, so we had to adjust last time. Learning from that, this time we were v

Agriculture committee  Yes, depending on the season and, again, the time that it takes to do the investigation. If it's a marketing season for producers, we have to work around their time, and if it's calving season in spring, we have to work around their time. Those are the factors that affect the tim

Agriculture committee  As I said in my opening remarks, traceability is very important when doing an investigation. In this case, because the tag was there on the animal, we were able to zero in on the farm of origin. They are very important for our investigation. These tags are also very important for

Agriculture committee  First, bovine tuberculosis is a disease that evolves very slowly, and it takes a lot of time for an animal to be infected. We have to go back five years to see whether the animals that joined the herd or left it during that period of time were infected. If the bacteria infects an