Via CBC News Calgary, a June 17 report: Low immunization rate blamed for exponential growth of whooping cough outbreak near Lethbridge. Excerpt and then a comment:
Southern Alberta is seeing a surge of cases of pertussis, or whooping cough, and a health official says it's directly related to low immunization rates in some areas.
As of Thursday morning, 38 cases in the Lethbridge area have been linked.
"We are getting multiple lab reports a day and we are definitely seeing this outbreak taking off at an exponential rate," Vivien Suttorp, Alberta Health Services' lead medical officer of health for the south zone, told CBC News.
"We have had a lot of individuals and children exposed to cases of whooping cough and we have a lot of individuals who are not immunized at all."
Suttorp warns those are just the confirmed cases and that whooping cough can often go unreported.
"Individuals who have an ongoing cough for two or three months may not know that they have whooping cough because symptoms can be mild in adults and older children. It's the very young ones that are mostly likely to come to a physician's attention," Suttorp explained.
"There are many, many more out there that we are not aware of."
Immunization rates in southern Alberta can vary significantly.
The Fort Macleod area, for example, ranks nearly dead last out of 132 local health zones in Alberta, but the neighbouring community of Pincher Creek — immediately to the west — ranks among the highest.
The name of one particular church — the Netherlands Reformed Congregation — often comes up when talking about vaccination rates in the Fort Macleod area.
Three years ago I published a Tyee article about a measles outbreak in our own Fraser Valley that was quickly traced to a Dutch Reformed private school. This made it politically dicey: the Fraser Valley is solid right-wing, full of strong supporters of our right-wing provincial government.
While such folks are cautious about newfangled vaccines, they're fans of air travel. The measles outbreak was a direct result of a visit from the Netherlands. A similar visit in 1978 brought British Columbia what I believe was its last polio case.
It beats me why religious groups think God disapproves of vaccines, when He endowed us with both immune systems and brains to strengthen those systems. We're the ones who are supposed to have dominion over the earth, not a bunch of viruses.
