Ebola. SARS. BSE. They may be household names but referring to these pathogens is enough to strike fear in the hearts of anyone within earshot.

Unless, of course, it happens to be a researcher from the Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health (CSCHAH), a state-of-the-art laboratory complex in Winnipeg operated jointly by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). It houses the CFIA’s National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease as well as the PHAC’s National Microbiology Laboratory.Here, the diseases create excitement.

Dr. Frank Plummer, Chief Scientific Advisor, PHAC and Scientific Director General, National Microbiology Laboratory, and his counterpart, Dr. Paul Kitching, Director, National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease, say their teams are kept busy by these diseases and other things you read in the newspapers, such as bioterrorism.

“Whether it’s getting ready for a pandemic of influenza, dealing with existing problems withWest Nile or problems with E.coli and Salmonella, anti-microbial resistance in hospitals—things like C.difficile and the superbugs—all those things are day-to-day business,” says Plummer. “What keeps us the busiest at any given time varies based on what’s going on. In addition to the research we’re doing, we have a key role in responding to these problems.”