Measles — the unwelcome return of a scourge

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/02/2025 (236 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Welcome back, measles. We’ve been expecting you.

Well, perhaps “welcome” isn’t the most aptly chosen word, because no one is happy to see this most confounding disease resurface. But as a result of the troubling societal shift in attitudes toward communicable diseases and the prevention thereof, it’s fair to say measles’ return was pretty much inevitable.

Last week, provincial Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara took the somewhat unusual step of urging the public to get vaccinated against measles, after an outbreak was reported in southern Manitoba. The cluster of cases was linked to a recent outbreak in Ontario, and several local sites, including a church in Winkler and two hospitals in Winnipeg, were subsequently identified as locations where others could possibly have been exposed to the virus.

Asagwara’s underlying message — and the message of health officials wherever the latest in a widening wave of measles resurgences occurs — is that this is a very dangerous disease whose spread can effectively be halted by communitywide vaccination.

“It’s very, very important,” Asagwara said, given the rampant online dissemination of misinformation and disinformation, to advise all Manitobans that “vaccines are safe, (and) vaccines are effective.”

Unfortunately, in Manitoba and in many other jurisdictions across Canada and beyond, vaccine uptake has declined to well below the 95 per cent at which so-called “herd immunity” is considered to have been achieved. And as a result, measles — a disease that infects the respiratory tract and can spread throughout the body, causing severe complications and even death — is making a comeback.

In an interview this week on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Dr. Adam Ratner, head of pediatric infectious diseases at New York University, called the recent measles upsurge “very alarming and sadly predictable,” noting the disease is more contagious than influenza, COVID or even Ebola.

“Because measles is so contagious, it’s the first sign we see when something has gone wrong with our public health system,” said Ratner, author of the newly released Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health. He predicts upsurges in other vaccine-preventable diseases, from pertussis (whooping cough) to polio, are likely to follow.

It doesn’t have to happen. The vaccines to prevent such outbreaks are proven, safe and widely available. But vaccine hesitancy among parents has risen sharply in recent years, fuelled by masses of internet-spread misinformation and the rise of anti-vax communities that repeat and reinforce that which is not true — including the thoroughly debunked association of measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccines with autism.

We live, rather lamentably, in an era in which celebrity is somehow equated with credibility, and wide swaths of the public are more inclined to believe the fevered rantings of a faded reality-TV star or a former centrefold model than information from a trained medical professional. And once a conspiracy theory gains a foothold in the online realm, it’s all but impossible for actual experts armed with facts and research to reverse the momentum of misinformation spread by those who defiantly proclaim they “do their own research.”

As Ratner puts it, “it is much easier to scare people than to unscare people.”

Here’s some frightening food for thought: before the introduction of the vaccine in 1963, measles was responsible for more than 2.5 million deaths — mostly children — annually. Widespread vaccination and herd immunity all but eliminated the threat, until the recent (particularly post-COVID) rise of ill-informed skepticism and hesitancy made the current resurgence possible.

Measles is most definitely back, but it doesn’t have to be welcome. There’s an easy way for communities like ours to make sure it doesn’t settle in for a long stay.