Making more kids’ pain medicine in Canada may not be ‘best way’ to spend money: Trudeau – National | 24CA News
As Canada faces an ongoing scarcity of youngsters’s drugs, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he doesn’t know if ramping up home manufacturing of prescribed drugs is the appropriate method to addressing the issue.
“I don’t know offhand if it is the right thing for Canada to be starting producing these particular pills or whether it’s just a question of getting more reliable supply chains and agreements out there,” Trudeau mentioned final week in an interview with The Canadian Press.
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Canada has been experiencing a nationwide scarcity of kids’s ache drugs for months, leaving mother and father scrambling to handle their youngsters’s fever and ache as charges of respiratory syncytial virus and influenza skyrocket.
The drug scarcity has led to some requires Canada to speculate extra in its pharmaceutical manufacturing capacities for important drugs.
However, Trudeau mentioned which may not be the most effective use of taxpayer {dollars}.
“If we had a big orange shortage in Canada, people might be shouting, ‘Okay, we need to make them more greenhouses so we can grow more oranges in Canada,”’ the prime minister mentioned.
“That might not be the best way to spend our money.”
Trudeau mentioned he’s targeted on fixing the issue of drug shortages utilizing probably the most environment friendly method, even when meaning sourcing drugs from different locations on the earth.
The instance Trudeau used as an instance the distinction between importing and producing domestically was an excessive amount of of an apples-to-oranges comparability for the NDP’s well being critic Don Davies.
“To compare oranges to essential medication that people may need to stay alive … that’s a terrible analogy,” he mentioned.
Davies mentioned Canada wants a nationwide technique for prescribed drugs that may each promote a powerful personal sector and embrace a publicly owned producer. “Do we want to be vulnerable to the vagaries and vulnerabilities of global supply chains and decisions made by the private sector?”
For drugs which are briefly provide, the federal authorities has been counting on imports. Health Canada has introduced in practically 1.9 million bottles of international merchandise and “more is coming,” a spokeswoman mentioned on Tuesday.
She mentioned the federal division is “using all tools at its disposal to help alleviate the shortage” of ache drugs and “proactively working with companies to facilitate the importation of foreign products.”
But pharmacists have warned that the emergency imports might not be sufficient.
“Most of the pharmacies are doing purchase limits, one quantity per person, keeping it behind the counter, telling people to buy only what they need,” Shelita Dattani, vice chairman of pharmacy affairs for the Neighbourhood Pharmacy Association of Canada, mentioned final month.
Canada’s expertise with the pandemic and vaccine procurement has raised questions on how a lot the nation ought to depend on world provide chains for important items.
Jillian Kohler, a professor on the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, mentioned governments must be rather more engaged in relation to guaranteeing dependable provides of pharmaceutical merchandise.
She mentioned the scarcity of kids’s ache remedy speaks to the nation’s “very problematic” dependence on sources outdoors Canada’s borders and on the personal sector.
“We need to think of health products as health security, as something that’s a national-security issue,” she mentioned. “And relying on the private sector, whether it’s domestic or external to Canada, is risky.”
Davies mentioned making a public producer of pharmaceutical merchandise wouldn’t be a wholly new concept. The federal authorities used to personal Connaught Laboratories, which developed and produced vaccines in addition to insulin. The laboratory was offered off to the personal sector within the Nineteen Eighties.
However, University of Toronto professor Christopher Rutty mentioned in an electronic mail that the lab was not targeted on the event and manufacturing of chemically-derived prescribed drugs resembling ache remedy.
Kohler mentioned public manufacturing has not been traditionally seen as a cheap method of manufacturing drugs. She mentioned it’s time for a shift in pondering.
“Governments have a responsibility for the health of their populations. And old models don’t work, as we’ve seen. So we need to rethink: how do we ensure security for our population’s health needs?”
© 2022 The Canadian Press
