Measles situations shows vaccines' value - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Last week a baby born prematurely to a woman in Alberta died from measles, the second person in Canada killed by the current infection. The article I read didn’t give the name of the mother or whether or not she had been vaccinated.

 

A piece recently by reporter Nathan VanderKlippe in the Globe and Mail, and commented on by columnist Dr. Andre Picard, shows the  extreme susceptibility of us humans to this disease. Nearly 5,000 people in Canada, and thousands in an outbreak in Texas, have suffered measles, all beginning with one case.

 

Patient No. 1 was a Canadian: Lea Knelson living in Thailand, who travelled around the world to attend her sister’s wedding in rural New Brunswick, with stops in Bangkok, Manila, Vancouver, Toronto and Fredericton. When she arrived, she wasn’t feeling well, but she put it down to the strenuous travel and was determined not to miss the wedding.

 

Five days later, she was hospitalized with pneumonia, a common side effect of measles. Public health officials realized they were dealing with a potential measles outbreak. Knelson had not been vaccinated, not because she was anti-vaccine, but because she thought childhood diseases were not a threat anymore. “I always thought, ‘Oh, most of those diseases are not really around anymore. It never really crossed my mind that I would get something that was actually serious,” she said in the story. Measles was eliminated (meaning there was no continuous domestic spread for at least a year) in Canada in 1998, and in the U.S. in 2000.

 

Measles is also one of the most highly contagious pathogens on earth. It can take up to 14 days for symptoms to show up after exposure. The early symptoms are similar to a cold, so it’s hard to diagnose until you see the tell-tale red spots. 

 

Every single unvaccinated person at the wedding also ended up contracting measles, and they fanned out far and wide, some to Mennonite communities where vaccination rates are low. First, New Brunswick recorded 66 cases. Ten days after the wedding, the first case was reported in Ontario.

 

In January, cases started being reported in West Texas, around the town of Seminole, where there is a large Mennonite community with ties to Canada. By March, there was a large outbreak underway in Alberta. As of last month, Ontario has recorded 2,379 cases, Alberta 1,847, and Texas 762. (The dominant viral lineage in both Canada and the U.S. is “MVs/Ontario.CAN/47.24”).

 

Measles can tear through communities quickly. But, because a lot of people, and children in particular, are still being vaccinated, it can also be a slow burn, with just enough cases to keep the outbreak alive, and the virus spreading. 

 

We know, too, Dr. Picard says, that measles messes with the immune system, leaving those who are infected vulnerable to other viral and bacterial illnesses. 

 

The death of this child is the third death in North America due to this single imported infection; it’s the second death in Canada and there has been one in Texas.

 

This outbreak also occurred soon after Robert Kennedy Jr. was named secretary of health and human services. Kennedy believes that people who have been vaccinated are more likely to get autism, although there is no proof for this belief.

 

Kennedy purged more than a dozen medical experts serving on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in June. Kennedy’s new advisory panel met in September to discuss and vote on key vaccine recommendations going into the respiratory virus season. Days later, Kennedy and the Trump administration repeated the claim about autism, a theory that has been thoroughly debunked for years.

 

And yet, between people who believe Kennedy’s conspiratorial theory that vaccination can cause autism and people like Knelson, who think that everybody else has been vaccinated so they don’t need to be, vaccination rates have been dropping.

 

It’s a shame that in Canada only 92 per cent of people have had one dose of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella -­ rubella was formerly known as German measles or three-day measles) vaccine and just 79 per cent have had two doses of the MMR -  well below the threshold needed for herd immunity, which is 95 per cent.

 

I had measles when I was a child, well  before the vaccine was available, and survived. But a brother, born before World War II, died of the disease. 

 

Because we have vaccines for once-deadly diseases like MMR and polio, we have gotten beyond the point of worrying about them. Then along comes someone like Kennedy and we’re all in danger again. What a shame!