Ottawa Public Health is urging families to get vaccinated against measles after the disease returned to Canada with an outbreak in Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario.
No cases have yet been reported in Ottawa. But being vaccinating is the best way to keep the highly contagious virus away, states Ottawa Public Health.
Officials have appeared at city hall to offer information about the situation as well as the administration has been active in the media:
”Vaccines are the best way to protect against very serious infections like measles,” says Eric Leclairthe health unit’s head of health information co-ordination. “Anyone who has not had measles infection or has not been fully vaccinated is at risk of infection.”
Measles is a highly contagious virus that is spread through direct contact to infected mucous and respiratory droplets, but can also be contracted just by breathing in an area where an infected person has recently sneezed. Symptoms typically include a severe rash and fever. In a small percentage of cases, the condition could lead to deadly inflammation of the brain.
Ottawa’s public vaccination program in the 1960’s seems to have paid off. The country was declared measles free in 1998 but the virus is now making a comeback.
Despite the health unit’s recommendation that residents be vaccinated, the debate about vaccines is intense across Canada. In a daycare in Orleans Melissa Abekah is offering parents a “vaccine-free environment” for their children, she told CBC News.
Abekah and her husband told CBC News that they chose not vaccinate their own daughter after researching vaccines. Saying they don’t trust the ingredients contained in vaccines and that children who are vaccinated carry a virus for at least 30 days and, thus, could pass it on to other children.
OPH’s program manager for vaccine-preventable diseases questioned the basis of that statement. “You can’t give the disease to someone else because you were vaccinated,” Marie-Claude Turcotte told the National Post.
“Ottawa Public Health would not encourage a vaccine-free environment,” she added.
The debate about whether to vaccinate children or not is intesfying both online and in the Ontario region – which leads to the question: is the vaccine genuinely safe?
“Yes, the MMR vaccine is very safe and effective,” Leclair says. “Parents shouldn’t worry about that.”
Leclair says that allergic reactions to the MMR vaccine are very rare and that the only ones to be conscious about it are pregnant women. But everyone else should have no reason to avoid the vaccine.
Centretown Parents’ Co-operative Daycare follows the recommendations of Ottawa Public Health strictly.
“Our policy is that every child should be immunized before registering to our daycare,” says Janet Fredette, an early childhood educator at the James Street daycare.
“We do take that very seriously. The children we have here shouldn’t infect others with diseases like measles. Parents have to sign a procedure that their children’s are vaccinated before coming to us,”
Centretown Parents’ Co-operative Daycare is already preparing to step up the sanitation by being extra careful that parents, staff and children don’t bring the bacteria inside.
“Our hygiene is already at a very high level, but we will look to step it up even further to prevent it from spreading if measles cases should show up in Ottawa in the near future,” Fredette says.
Before the introduction of the first live measles vaccine in 1963, most children contracted the disease. After Ontario implemented an improved version of this vaccine seven years later, cases dropped by 95 per cent, and the later adding of a second dose eliminated endemic cases by 1998.
Ottawa Public Health is concerned that the 14 unrelated people with measles in Southern Ontario, most of whom are unvaccinated, had not recently left the country.
If this outbreak continues to spread, the virus could at worst regain its widespread status in Ottawa and Canada in general, warns Isabel Wallace, a sessional lecturer in history at Trent University, told the Ottawa Citizen.