Earlier today I posted an item on The Tyee's blog, The Hook, about the reluctance of the local health authority to name the Chilliwack school where the two measles cases were enrolled.
But I had my suspicions, recalling a long-ago time when one of the last polio cases in the province resulted from a visitor from Holland. Google found a news story about it, and also about a 2008 outbreak of mumps.
Here's the report, from the August 30, 2008 edition of The Vancouver Sun: Dutch Reformed likely at heart of mumps outbreak. Excerpt:
A retired physician in Chilliwack vividly remembers the conservative Christian mushroom farmer who came to him in 1978 severely ill with polio, which was starting to paralyze his body.
The B.C. polio victim was a member of an arch-conservative arm of the Dutch Reformed church, which held it goes against God's will to accept vaccinations for polio or other infectious diseases, Dr. R. W. Van der Flier said in an interview.
The B.C. mushroom farmer had caught the polio virus from a visitor from the Netherlands who was a member of the same traditionalist Protestant Reformed denomination, which was at the time the focus of a severe polio outbreak in Holland.
That decades-old drama is echoing again this week. Fraser Valley Health officials have acknowledged an outbreak of mumps that originated in the Chilliwack area was linked to a Christian group that doesn't believe in vaccinations.
Of the more than 196 cases reported since the outbreak began in Chilliwack in February, 10 to 20 are still active. Half of the people who have been infected had not been immunized.
Van der Flier joins with other residents of Chilliwack, university professors and health researchers around the world in confirming that some members of the Reformed tradition in the valley, as well as in other parts of Canada and the Netherlands, continue to refuse vaccinations for polio, measles, rubella, mumps and other infectious diseases.
Although Fraser Valley Health officials have not named followers of the tradition as a source of the mumps outbreak, health officials in southern Ontario confirmed that some new cases of the viral disease in that province are tied to members of the "Netherlands Reformed Church" who shun vaccinations.
Eurosurveillance, a leading journal on infectious disease, also reported that a 2005 outbreak of rubella among unvaccinated Reformed Christians in the Netherlands had spread to hundreds of members of the same highly conservative Protestant sect in southern Ontario.
I don't know if the same group is now affected by measles, but it's likely not the only community in this province with a negative attitude to vaccination.
