The reason I raise this concern is because I believe that we are sort of relaxing our awareness of the disease and also because of this situation in Fort McPherson. A lady who has had it is now in a coma in Edmonton. She made attempts to go to the health centre for almost a year and the only way that they finally caught it was because she was bedridden and they had to practically carry her to the hospital before they did something. She taught at the school as a teacher. How far do you have to go before we take all diseases seriously?

We heard in the communities about cancer, where people are told, they have an ulcer or they have this or that. Now look at doctors reporting in Aklavik that there is a definite connection to this virus, where a lot of people took it for granted that it was gas or an ulcer or whatever. There is actually a virus out there that causes stomach cancer. These instances have been happening and I have heard a lot of them. For myself, I feel that we have to do more in regard to public awareness but we also have to do more for prevention and, also, make us aware. We are not immune. We live in a global environment that these diseases could be carried from one country to another person in another country within a day, or two days, at the most. You can travel from one end of the world to the other end of the world not knowing that you have these diseases. We are not immune to it in the North.

We have to do more and take more preventative steps to ensure that we treat all ailments as serious in the context that we could have major outbreaks in the future because of these different ailments. Just in regard to the case in Fort McPherson, that is where there has been a lot of concerns raised because of how it came about and who knows what the long-term implications are. You could be negative one day and positive the next. You do not know how long it takes, especially with children. We do not know what the effects on those children are. Can the Minister tell me what is being done to ensure that we are taking preventative measures, especially when it comes to communicable diseases?