Via The Globe and Mail, an excellent column by André Picard: Nobel-worthy drugs, virtually unseen in Canada. Excerpt:
So why are ivermectin and artemisinin, drugs that are on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines, not readily available in Canada – at least for humans? (Ivermectin is widely prescribed by veterinarians to treat parasitic worms in pets and farm animals. Some savvy consumers even use their dogs’ medicine to treat their kids’ head lice.)
The simple – and absurd – reason is that it is not worth the drug maker’s time, effort and expense to have these world-beating drugs approved for sale in a market as small as Canada.
What these examples tell us is that the drug regulator, Health Canada, needs to be more flexible and less bureaucratic. There is no reason that these drugs, which have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and have been used safely on millions of people, cannot be rubber-stamped and made available to Canadian patients in need.
These neglected, Nobel-winning drugs also remind us that Canada doesn’t have a coherent policy on how to approve and fund so-called orphan drugs (those used for rare conditions, and for which there is a desperate need but no profitable market). The federal government unveiled an Orphan Drug Framework in 2012, but still hasn’t implemented it.
Finally, that we actually need ivermectin and artemisinin in Canadian health practices is a sobering reminder that the world is getting smaller, and that tropical diseases are not just in the tropics.
The Nobel Prize, which highlighted a China-Japan-U.S. triumvirate of excellence in research, reminds us that, in science, there is no longer an “us” and “them.” There shouldn’t be in our drug-approval system either.
