Thank you for the question. I think it offers a number of insights.

Certainly, as Scott has touched on, the reality of disease emergence is constantly changing, and it's emerging on an ongoing basis. We see up to five new diseases emerge every year, and 60% of those have an animal base or an animal origin to them that can affect human health as well.

I would like to say that lessons get learned, but I would be remiss if I said that with sincerity, because I think that while often there are lessons noted, our reality is that history tends to repeat itself all too often.

Canada itself is not immune to the introduction of diseases on farms, obviously, like all nations. The committee might recall two of the more memorable ones. One was foot-and-mouth disease in Saskatchewan in 1952, which obviously predates the vast majority of the committee members, I'd suggest. It was concluded that the foot-and-mouth disease in Saskatchewan was ultimately related to a farm worker who moved from West Germany to Saskatchewan in 1951. The area in West Germany where he resided and worked with livestock was suffering from an outbreak of foot-and-mouth type A, which was the same type of foot-and-mouth that emerged on farms in Saskatchewan over the subsequent time period. It's postulated that it may have been the result of boots and clothing that he brought with him that were not cleaned and disinfected. Obviously those issues of disinfection and cleaning weren't as prevalent in industry at that time as they are today. Again, that was an incident that was determined to be caused when a farm worker actually introduced the disease.

More recently, in 2009, we dealt in Canada and globally with the outbreak of H1N1, which unfortunately picked up the misnomer of “swine flu”, which was totally inappropriate, given it was a triple-reassortant virus. In this situation, Canada was one of 22 countries around the world where infection with H1N1 was finally detected or confirmed in swine populations. Again, in the vast majority of those circumstances, it was determined that these pigs had been infected by people—

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