By James Matthews
The region under the umbrella of the Haliburton Kawartha Northumberland Peterborough public health unit remains untouched by Ontario’s measles outbreak.
Dr. Thomas Piggott, the HKNP Health Unit’s medical officer of health, said during the board’s April 16 meeting that there has been no local confirmed cases of measles.
“But there continues to be lots of additional cases provincially,” he said.
According to provincial public health updates, there have been 816 confirmed cases in Ontario since last fall, he said.
“Which is significant,” Piggott said. “It’s exponential compared to recent years and that’s really because vaccination rates have fallen.”
Those 816 cases stretch across 15 of the province’s 29 public health units. Focused further, more than half of those cases are in regions served by two public health units with key communities that have had very low vaccine uptake.
Despite 61 hospitalizations, there has been no deaths during the current outbreak, he said.
Local public health officials reported just last month that there were 350 cases across 11 health units, including neighbouring public health units.
“We did see a death in Ontario a couple of years ago from measles, so we know this is still a potentially fatal illness,” Piggott said. “Sixty-one hospitalizations, that’s a lot of people very severely sick from measles.”
Teams with the local public health unit continue preparations to respond should HKNP be drawn into the outbreak geography.
Piggott said in March that preparations include ongoing school surveillance, public education awareness, and ensuring contact tracing readiness.
The outbreak has come as close as Hastings County and Simcoe County. The challenge presented by a large outbreak like the current one is vaccine effectiveness.
Two doses of the vaccine has proven to be 97 per cent effective, he said.
“The way to arrest measles in its tracks is to increase vaccine coverage,” he said. “And one of the most important strategies we have to do is hard work, supporting access to vaccines, and enforcing the Immunization of School Pupils Act, which is legislation designed to protect the health of children.”
Ensuring school-aged children are adequately vaccinated is a lot of work for public health officials, Piggott said. But that burden of work is carried out in a collaborative manner to ensure the best access possible for families.
“We see coverage rates jump up significantly when this (public health work) is in place,” he said. “In the last few years we’ve seen more people that are choosing to refuse vaccination for their children, which I think is really unfortunate given how important and life-saving the interventions are.”
There is a group of people who have forgotten, or have become complacent, or haven’t been able to access vaccines. And that makes the work done by public health officials, even though it is a lot of work, more important to stop measles in its tracks, he said.
“It is really important,” Piggott said. “I’ve worked before in provinces without that kind of legislation and you really miss out on a critical opportunity to make sure our kids are protected against life-threatening illnesses.”
