Thank you very much. It's a privilege to speak with you here today.
As mentioned, I'm representing the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.
There are four key points I want to make in my brief statements today. These focus on the One Health initiative; food safety; the issue of disease surveillance; and finally, the role of education, which I would be remiss not to talk about.
Regarding the One Health initiative, it's an initiative that recognizes the connection between animal health, public health, and environmental health. And it's really all about creating linkages and breaking down silos. I note that this was a goal of Growing Forward as well, in creating the science clusters and trying to bring together teams from different areas and promoting collaboration.
A current example on our campus would be developing faculty chairs. As funding is considered for various places, I would support the role of funding things like faculty chairs. A chair in an area like food safety would serve to bring various specialists from multiple different areas together to work on a common theme.
The University of Saskatchewan is the only campus with all the health sciences on one campus—and, again, following that One Health model we bring all of the health science colleges and deans together through a common council. One Health is important if you think about the over 1,400 known infectious micro-organisms. Over 60% of those are zoonotic, meaning they are transmissible between animals and people. If you look at new emerging or re-emerging diseases, 75% of them are transmissible between animals and people. So One Health is a key area in terms of agriculture and animal health, and veterinary medicine and public health.
Many of these diseases can cause very serious illness or even pandemic threats. We've all read the papers or experienced issues with avian influenza, SARS, or even tuberculosis and mad cow disease. I would comment that when the Prime Minister visited the campus not too long ago for the opening of InterVac, he commented that 18 cases of BSE had resulted in a $6.5 billion economic impact.
Regarding food safety, something in the neighbourhood of 76 million Americans per year suffer from food-borne illness, and of those, 5,000 die. In Canada the estimates are somewhere between 11 million and 13 million cases of food-borne illness annually, with a chronic health problem resulting in 2% to 3% of those, at a potential cost of $12 billion to $14 billion. Some of those case numbers are probably underestimated. It's our sense that many of the cases of actual food-borne illness go unreported.
So for a food safety program, important deliverables would be disease investigation and prevention; the training of trained, qualified professionals, again recognizing the broad range of interests that would be important to food safety; ongoing action and research, with that work informing public policy, science, and the policy links, and addressing the whole spectrum from the farm to the fork; and then, of course, the One Health application as well.
There are a number of key stakeholders for food safety. I have a list in my speaking notes, including federal and provincial agencies; producer groups; the food industries; the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre; and first nations communities. But the reality is that everyone who eats food is a stakeholder when it comes to food safety. And there is a broad range of those stakeholders and partners.
I mentioned disease surveillance and would point out in this regard that's it's important to focus on rapid disease diagnostics, disease containment, loss mitigation as a result of that, and market preservation. It's important because we need to maintain markets through the health of our national herd, and to provide a safe and secure food supply, and maintain public health by minimizing the potential for zoonotic disease transmission. Disease transmission is critical in all those areas.
It's an area where there is a lot of connection and cooperation as well.
At the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, we have a disease investigation unit that goes out and investigates disease outbreaks at the farm level. A diagnostic lab, through Prairie Diagnostic Services, facilitates those diagnoses. The toxicology centre connects us to the school of the environment. We work with the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre, which is a critical component of disease surveillance in the wildlife population that, again, comes in contact with our production animals and people as well. And, of course, in our college's example, there are our traditional and strong ties with agriculture and bioresources.
I would also stress the importance of the Canadian Animal Health Surveillance Network, a network supported by CFIA that links the animal health diagnostic labs together, and also links them to the Public Health Laboratory Network.
Finally, I'd like to stress the role of academia and the important role of knowledge creation in developing expertise in new technology, including through graduate education and broad research initiatives for educating and training the next generation of highly qualified professionals and preparing the next generation of innovators; developing new tools; and linking knowledge and skills interprofessionally, for instance, through the One Health initiative and the multiple disciplines related to areas such as food safety.
I think it's important for universities to be able to address regional strengths and regional issues and then to cooperate nationally. Oftentimes, it seems that when federal funding is sought, we're looking to fund the same process nationally. As an example, in Saskatoon we're one of the few research centres for beef. Prince Edward Island would be an area for aquatic disease investigation, and so forth. It's important that we be able to fund regional strengths and that those universities then cooperate with each other. There is strong cooperation between the veterinary schools and the colleges of agriculture across Canada.
I have a final comment regarding funding. I think it's important to consider going beyond funding on a project-by-project basis and to consider investing in people and programs as well, in order to develop those new projects.
With that I'll end my comments. Thank you very much.