05/18/2024
Unvaccinated Hamilton child died from measles infection
Hamilton public health is urging parents to get their children vaccinated
By
Grant LaFlecheReporter
Friday, May 17, 2024
2 min to read
Ontario’s first measles death in more than a decade was an unvaccinated Hamilton child.
Hamilton’s public health department confirmed Friday afternoon that the child, who was under five years old, was from Hamilton — but would not release any further information.
“This is a profoundly tragic situation where a young child has left us too soon with their whole life ahead of them. There have been six confirmed cases of measles in Hamilton thus far in 2024, all of whom have not previously received a measles-containing vaccine,” said Hamilton’s associate medical officer of health, Dr. Brendan Lew. “To respect and protect the privacy of the child and their loved ones, we will not be speaking to further details of this individual case.”
The measles death was first disclosed in a report published Thursday by Public Health Ontario, although that report did not indicate where the child was from.
The report said that as of May 15, “22 confirmed cases of measles were reported in Ontario” this year.
Thirteen of those cases were children and the agency confirmed 12 of them were not vaccinated against the highly infectious and dangerous virus. The vaccine status of the 14th child is not known, says the report.
Five of the children were hospitalized, including the Hamilton child who died from the infection.
measles_2
Regular school-age vaccination programs, which include the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, were put on the back burner as public health resources were redeployed to combat COVID-19.
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Neither the report nor Hamilton’s public health department is saying how the child contracted the virus.
Of the 22 cases this year — six of them being unvaccinated Hamilton residents, according to Hamilton public health — 15 were the result of travel, says the Public Health Ontario report. Another five were the result of close contact with an infected person, while the remaining two cases are listed as having an “unknown” origin.
Shelly Bolotin, director of the Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, told the Toronto Star she’s not clear when the last measles death occurred in Canada.
She said the country eliminated measles in 1998. It is likely that the last recorded measles death in this country occurred more than 25 years ago.
The Public Health Ontario report published Thursday does not include data prior to 2013.
Dr. Shaun Morris, a pediatric infectious diseases physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, said children under the age of five “are at greatest risk for infection and for severe outcomes.”
He said a “significant proportion” of children with measles will have complications, “such as pneumonia or diarrheal disease or other secondary bacterial infections.” Generally, about 20 per cent of measles cases will need hospital care.
Vaccination rates across the Western world dropped significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Regular school-age vaccination programs, which include the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, were put on the back burner as public health resources were redeployed to combat COVID-19.
In December, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a 30-fold rise in measles cases in Europe. In cities like Hamilton, the MMR vaccination rate dropped below the threshold needed to stop community spread of the virus.
In February, faced with data that showed more than a third of school-aged children did not have up-to-date immunization records, Hamilton’s public health department launched a new push to get local children vaccinated. Parents had until the first week of March to get those records updated, or their children could be suspended from school.
That push was suspended on March 1 after a Feb. 25 cyberattack on City of Hamilton computer systems cut the public health department off from its vaccination record database. The status of the of the vaccination program was not immediately available from public health on Friday.
“We encourage all Hamiltonians to review their vaccination records to make sure they are up to date on routine immunizations including MMR, and discuss with their health care provider if they are unsure,” said Lew in an emailed statement.
—With files from the Toronto Star
Grant LaFleche
Grant LaFleche is an award-winning investigative journalist with the Hamilton Spectator. Reach him at glafleche@torstar.ca.
