Measles has been eliminated from the Americas, the Pan American Health Organization announced this week. That’s not a reason to stop vaccinating for the disease. Quite the contrary — it’s compelling evidence in support of continuing vaccinations.
Measles was once a part of growing up. Almost everyone contracted the disease before the age of 15, enduring such symptoms as high fever, runny nose, inflamed eyes and a red rash.
In the early 1900s, deaths from measles complications were common — Canada recorded 800 measles-associated deaths in 1926 and a similar number in 1937. The death rate declined as care improved, but it was the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963 that made the major difference. Reported cases of measles rapidly dwindled as vaccines improved and were used more widely. The last endemic case of measles in Canada was reported in 1997, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
That wasn’t the end of measles in the country, though. New cases have cropped up because someone was infected abroad and brought the disease home. Low vaccination rates in some areas have allowed the disease to spread.
In 2014, the Fraser Valley saw an outbreak of measles, brought in by someone who had travelled out of the country. There was a relatively low vaccination rate among the people involved, largely because of religious beliefs, and 400 people were infected before authorities brought the outbreak under control.
In 2015, only 10 confirmed cases of measles were reported in B.C., and they stemmed from one person bringing the disease from outside the country.
To eliminate measles from every country in North, Central and South America is a public-health achievement worth celebrating, but it is not an occasion for complacency. The disease exists elsewhere in the world, and if people in this hemisphere become apathetic about vaccinations, we will see more outbreaks here.
“What’s keeping measles at bay right now in the Americas is our high vaccination rate,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Health Security, told the science news website LiveScience. “Any erosion in that vaccination rate would give measles a chance to re-establish itself.”
Endemic measles was almost eliminated in England and Wales by 1998, with 56 cases of the disease reported that year. But as vaccination rates fell, the disease returned, with 1,348 cases reported in 2008. In 2012, more than 2,000 cases were reported in that region.
To prevent the spread of measles from imported cases, says the World Health Organization, at least 95 per cent of the population in 80 per cent of a country’s cities should be vaccinated.
Some oppose vaccination for religious reasons. Others believe vaccination to be harmful, their fears fed by various anti-vaccination groups and the occasional celebrity.
Authorities linked low vaccination rates to views espoused by actor Jenny McCarthy, who was convinced her son’s autism was caused by vaccinations, a connection long since debunked by reputable scientists and health authorities.
“To McCarthy’s opponents, from the public-health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the pediatricians of the American Academy of Pediatrics, this makes McCarthy much worse than a crank. She’s a menace to public health,” wrote Time magazine in 2010.
Yes, there are risks with vaccinations, but they are extremely small, especially compared to the very real risks associated with measles and other diseases.
Smallpox has been eliminated from the globe, and we’re getting closer to eliminating polio. Home-grown measles has been eliminated from the Americas — with reasonable effort and education, it can be banished from the rest of the world.
