Western Canada: Alberta secures imported children’s acetaminophen as B.C. reports cases of new variant

Good morning. It’s James Keller in Calgary.

It’s been nearly a month since Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her health minister held a news conference to announce a deal to import millions of doses of children’s pain medication from Turkey.

The news came amid a wave of respiratory illnesses that strained children’s hospitals and cleared out store shelves of medication such as acetaminophen and ibuprofen. At the time, the government hoped the first shipment would arrive by Christmas. Two weeks ago, Health Minister Jason Copping said he was hopeful approval was days away.

But the process has dragged on as the province and the drug manufacturer – Atabay Pharmaceuticals and Fine Chemicals of Turkey – awaited Health Canada approval. And now there is the first sign of progress, after Health Canada issued its first approval related to the Alberta plan on the last business day of 2022.

The federal department authorized the importation of liquid paracetamol, which is another name for acetaminophen, for children aged 2 to 11. The authorization, which happened on Dec. 30, is limited to hospitals and not pharmacies and doesn’t include ibuprofen.

It’s not clear when Health Canada will make decisions on those and the department did not provide any more detail on how quickly that could happen. One of the challenges in increasing Canada’s supply of these drugs has been a labelling requirement to include both English and French. However, federal regulations exempt medication that is limited to hospital use, as is the case with the Atabay approval.

Charity Wallace, a spokesperson with Alberta Health Services, said in a statement that the government continues to work with Health Canada on approvals.

In neighbouring B.C., health officials confirmed five cases of a new COVID-19 variant that is quickly gaining dominance in the United States.

The XBB.1.5 subvariant of Omicron is believed to have accounted for more than half of cases reported in the United States over the holidays. As with previous variants before it, XBB.1.5 is believed to be even more transmissible and more easily able to evade protection from vaccines.

The British Columbia Centre for Disease Control says it has confirmed five cases of the subvariant but didn’t say where they were detected or provide more details.

The number is almost certainly an undercount. B.C., like other provinces, no longer offers widespread testing for COVID-19 and only tests the small proportion of cases involving patients with more severe illness or those at higher risk.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.