Canada learns to be prepared
Canada learned the hard way during the 2003 Sars outbreak that its citizens' frequent travel to and from Hong Kong would make the country vulnerable to a disease outbreak in the SAR.
'We probably were not prepared enough. We had not thought of all the different things that can happen. We had not thought of all the measures that we should put in place,' said the country's health minister, Ujjal Dosanjh, during his visit to Hong Kong earlier this month.
'I think that we need to recognise that we have a population that travels frequently back and forth, and we have travellers from all over the world that come to Canada.'
The index patient for the Sars outbreak in Toronto was the son of a Hong Kong-Canadian woman who stayed at Metropole Hotel in Kowloon, on the same floor as the mainland doctor who set off the global outbreak. A second wave hit Toronto after the city was declared free of Sars in May 2003.
Based on a set of recommendations by an expert group that investigated the two waves of outbreaks, the Canadian government set up the Public Health Agency (PHA) within the Department of Health, last September.
Even though the PHA reports directly to the health ministry and is under the department, it will also have the scientific independence to make decisions on dealing with future outbreaks.
