Via The Star: Measles outbreak closes B.C. school. The outbreak is now getting national attention, and it apparently came close to becoming an international problem. Excerpt, and then a comment:
Dr. Paul Van Buynder said the outbreak hasn’t spread further into the wider community, as the students at the Mount Cheam Christian School have returned to their homes.
“What we don’t know is if it will leak into the community,” he said in an interview.
The students are members of a the Reformed Congregation of North America.
The school’s principal declined to comment to the Star.
Van Buynder said he’s frustrated that 25 to 30 per cent of the surrounding community isn’t vaccinated against measles even though there are readily available and free vaccines.
Measles can cause fever, a rash, brain inflammation, pneumonia, brain damage, blindness, deafness and even death. It’s particularly dangerous for toddlers and infants.
Van Buynder has issued a warning to the Fraser East communities of Abbotsford, Mission, Chilliwack, Agassiz, Harrison Hot Springs and Hope.
“That’s not enough to provide herd immunity,” Van Buynder said.
“We supposedly had eradicated measles.”
Since measles has an incubation period of a couple of weeks, it’s too early to assess the scope of the problem, he said.
There have been recent outbreaks in Orthodox Protestant groups in Holland, as well as in India and the Philippines, Van Buynder said.
“We get sporadic access all of the time from people who go and visit these places and bring it back,” Van Buynder said.
Van Buynder said he’s thankful the school cancelled a planned trip to Haiti, which would have had potentially disastrous results to fellow airline passengers and people in Haiti.
“They cancelled the trip to Haiti,” he said. “That (the trip) would have been an absolute nightmare.”
Just imagine: Right across North America, with a stop or two at major American hub airports, and then immersion in a population with erratic vaccination.
Haiti had an "explosive epidemic" of measles in 2000, and in 2011 it had 58% vaccine coverage—if you define as "coverage" as one shot, not the two recommended in Canada. The CDC ran a big measles/rubella campaign in 2012 which reportedly boosted the rate to 91% (but only about half the kids aged 9 or younger got two doses).
On top of all its other public-health sorrows, inflicting measles on Haiti would have been adding insult to injury.
