Measles infections are rising across multiple provinces in Canada, surpassing the total cases of 2024. Public health alerts are issued detailing the movements of infected individuals to promote awareness and encourage vigilance among the public. The highly contagious nature of measles necessitates high vaccination rates to prevent outbreaks; ideally, 95% of a community should be immunized. Epidemiologist Caroline Colijn argues that these alerts aim to inform the public and assist in recognizing symptoms to protect vulnerable individuals in the community.
What those announcements are trying to do is really make people aware so that they can protect ... others around them and watch out for their own symptoms.
Because measles is so incredibly infectious, it can spread rapidly, even if most people in a community, 80 per cent, for example, are immunized.
The usual threshold is that you would want 95 per cent of the people in a community to either have been vaccinated or previously infected.
The announcements raise a couple questions: Why do measles cases seem to be slipping through health-care professionals' fingers or even going unrecognized by patients or their families?
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