Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to continue with my questioning on this superbug infection rate that arises in the Northwest Territories. I want to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services what is he doing with his other Ministers to work on this in a comprehensive manner, Housing, MACA, Health, Education. What is the Minister doing to put together comprehensive information, preventative measures to deal with this situation? Mostly infants are affected. What is the Minister doing with his other colleagues to deal with this dangerous, infectious superbug?
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department’s environmental health officers are visiting communities that are at most risk and working with local staff from those communities on how to address the issue. We haven’t done work with the other departments specifically on this as we try to address the issue of overcrowding or trying to address the issue of municipal services, if that is a factor at this time. We have not done that work. We are doing our work with the local health authorities and local health centres to see if we can address that issue in that way. Thank you.
The problem of Alberta attracts the community acquired MRSA disease, is this department tracking the community acquired… I know the Minister talked about the monitoring, but is he tracking it?
By knowing where the incidents are and monitoring this infection, we are in a sense, I guess, tracking. That is what is happening. We also are projecting to see if we can predict what is happening and try to do some prevention work. We are continuing to examine the patterns and the causes of this infection through the NWT, by monitoring the cases that are being reported. Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, it is a pretty deadly disease here. It takes the young children, the infants. It can cause some serious infection in internal organs and up to the flesh eating disease. People have died from it.
In regard to the territory having only two oral antibiotics that work against the MRSA and doctors don’t want to over-prescribe them and allow the bacteria to build up resistance, why is that? What are we doing to prevent this over-prescription of antibiotics?
Mr. Speaker, as I indicated earlier, drug-resistant infections cost a tremendous amount to the health care system. I think that these are clinical decisions made by doctors and that is their decision, is to not over-prescribe a certain drug into the system due to the fact that the virus or infection may be able to build up an immunity to that drug, then that is something that the department will follow. These decisions are clinical and then we try to take the advice of clinicians. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.
Given the situation that we are in the Northwest Territories and the limit of resources we have to combat this superbug, would the Minister consider, with all the colleagues, to look at radical change in housing situations? It is like putting a bandage type of solution on, because the root of the issue and the root cause… What is the root cause of this superbug?
One of the contributing factors is overcrowding in homes and children. Is it something that we really need to take a hard look at the housing in our communities and look at the overcrowding? Can the Minister commit that he will have this discussion with the Cabinet on looking at the overcrowding in our small communities?
Mr. Speaker, we can take a look at the patterns of where the infections are occurring and correlate them to whether or not they are caused by overcrowding.
Overcrowding is probably the number one factor to the spread of this infection. I can talk to not only the Minister of the Housing Corporation but also other Cabinet colleagues on this issue to try to address that as soon as possible. Thank you.
