Canada has a cold medication shortage that is primarily affecting the younger population, according to one Estevan pharmacist.

Dawn Marie Sloan-Beahm works at Henders Drugs in Estevan and says the pinch for the popular drugs has been felt nationwide.

"There's a Canada-wide shortage on cough and cold medications in general, but in particular there's a major shortage on children's medications, and that includes medications that are used for pain and fever, cough and cold, and even some of the children's antibiotics now are on shortage."

Sloan-Beahm pointed to two major factors that are contributing to the shortage.

"A major reason is because during COVID, especially that first year, we hardly sold any medications that would have been used for contagious diseases because kids were staying at home and not in school," she said. "And when people were out and about, they were masking and keeping distance from each other and using hand sanitizers."

"Almost a whole year went by where we sold virtually nothing for cough and cold and those types of medications, because kids weren't spreading it around."

Then there was an outbreak, Sloan-Beahm explained.

"Then in September when kids went back to school, there was a huge outbreak. Now the problem is during that slow down, manufacturers really cut back production because there was no demand," she said. "I'm thinking there were a lot of lay-offs at the plants, they decreased production, and then when this sudden demand hit, they weren't prepared to deal with the sudden demand. And so they haven't been able to catch up yet because they had lower staff available."

Sloan-Beahm said the second factor relates to the lack of manufacturing facilities in Canada, an issue that came up during the pandemic with vaccines.

"We don't have maybe as much manufacturing here in Canada as we would like to have," she said. "And so if the manufacturing plant for a particular item is in another country, they're going to look after their own country first before we have any supply in Canada. And so we're feeling it maybe a little bit more here than in possibly the United States."

Estevan doesn't have a compounding pharmacy, which are licensed to make products from scratch. Sloan-Beahm said the best bet for people in town to access unavailable products would be to try to get the products from Regina or Saskatoon.

But she added that there are alternatives. For example, her store is able to produce some Ibuprofen from scratch under prescription, in the absence of Advil and Tylenol. They also have alternatives available for Penicillin. 

"So we're doing the best we can," Sloan-Beahm said. "There's been major outbreaks of colds and flus that have been spreading across Canada, and we're seeing it particularly this last week. A lot of demand and having to try to find alternatives for patients."

She added that initially, hoarding was an issue, where she would see people pick up two or three bottles at a time. This caused her staff to keep some drugs in the back dispensary to be given to people who needed it the most.

"But we don't even have any at all now to be able to even do that," she said.

Sloan-Beahm added that as far as she knows, hospitals are also dealing with the same shortage.