Measles cases are cropping up across the country, and health officials are urging Canadians to get themselves and their children vaccinated.
In 1998, measles was officially declared eliminated in Canada. Where the disease still pops up in the country are the odd foreign cases, in which unvaccinated and under-vaccinated children bring it back to Canada after travelling abroad.
However, recent headlines have revealed spikes in measles cases across the country – with seventeen confirmed cases as of March 5 – and there are a few reasons why officials are concerned, specifically involving Canada’s youth populace.
For children, particularly those under the age of five, measles can have incredibly dangerous symptoms. A high fever, cough, runny nose, conjunctivitis and a rash are common in measles patients, but one out of 1000 people with measles will experience brain swelling, which can lead to brain damage. Between one and three patients out of 1000 will die. Hospitalization is also common.
Furthermore, the disease is highly contagious being transmitted through the air through coughs and sneezes with the capability of infecting nine out of ten unprotected people around an infected person. Furthermore, it can remain contagious in a room up to two hours after an infected person has left, and it is contagious from four days before developing a rash through four days afterward. This means infected individuals can be contagious before they even know their illness is anything more than a common cold.
In an interview with CTV News Toronto, reported on by CP24, Infectious Diseases Specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch said it “certainly looks like” community transmission is occurring, in which those infected have acquired the disease locally instead of internationally. If this is the case, then those who are unvaccinated have an increased chance of catching measles from someone in their community.
What complicates the issue is that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, not only have children missed opportunities to be vaccinated, but misinformation regarding vaccinations has run rampant.
“Trust in public health and all of the things that we do has eroded,” said Dr. Mehdi Aloosh, the Medical Officer of Health for the Windsor-Essex Health Unit, in an interview with CBC.
Measles may only affect one in every thousand kids, but “if one in a thousand kids get really sick and gets encephalitis, brain inflammation, that’s a lot of kids that could potentially get really sick,” said Niagara’s medical officer of health, Dr. Azim Kasmani in an article by the St. Catharines Standard.
In the same article, Dr. Jessica Jackman, Niagara’s associate medical officer of health, urged residents to stay up to date on their vaccinations and those of their children. The news she gave was hopeful, that while only 79 per cent of seven-year-old children are vaccinated across Canada, Niagara’s school-aged children are at about 90 per cent.
“Our team has been working very hard to catch the kids who may not be up to date with their vaccines, which is really important to make sure they’re protected against measles,” Jackman said. “Our aim is to get that number even higher” and get to 95 per cent vaccinated, a which many officials agree to be the threshold at which herd immunity can be achieved.
Niagara’s numbers are positive, especially when considering the situation in Montreal, where the most measles cases are being reported, and where the risk is that numbers will “exponentially explode” in the coming months due to lower vaccination rates.
While vaccination is not entirely foolproof – with a 97 per cent immunity rate – the chances of immunized individuals contracting measles are far less than those who are not vaccinated, and even then, the disease would be much less severe, said Aloosh.
No cases of measles have been reported in Niagara at the time of writing, but with the potential for outbreaks increasing, health officials highly recommend getting vaccinated, especially when preparing to travel. Whether these will remain isolated issues or not is yet to be seen.
