Thanx Jim, Tam, a pediatric infectious disease specialist, was assistant deputy minister of the infectious disease prevention and control branch at PHAC.
Tam was a co-chair of a 2006 federal report on pandemic preparedness in the wake of the SARS outbreak in Canada, which envisioned a respiratory infection pandemic that was described in The Globe and Mail as foreshadowing the 2019-20 COVID-19 pandemic "with eerie accuracy."
Tam said the opioid crisis, which cost over 2,500 lives in Canada in 2016, could be higher than 3,000 in 2017 if the current trend continues. "This far surpasses the number of motor-vehicle fatalities." She said overprescription of opioids contributed to this trend.
Tam has played a leadership role in Canada's response to public health emergencies including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), pandemic influenza H1N1, Ebola,[10] and COVID-19.
Tam is on the Independent Oversight and Advisory Committee of the Health Emergencies Programme of the World Health Organization (WHO), a role she took up between April and June 2018.
Tam is an official advisor to the WHO's International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on 2019-nCoV. Her speculative chart below.
