“This is a profoundly tragic situation where a young child has left us too soon with their whole life ahead of them,” said Dr. Brendan Lew, Hamilton’s associate medical officer of health, in a statement on Friday. A child under five had died of measles.
Public Health Ontario (PHO) said the child was not vaccinated. It is the province’s first measles death since 1989, the year tracking began. PHO did not say when the child died or give a specific age. Lew said the city’s public health agency would not discuss further details, “to respect and protect the privacy of the child and their loved ones.” Hamilton Health Sciences, which runs McMaster Children’s Hospital, said privacy rules kept it from confirming whether the child was in its care.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking in Winnipeg, called it “a tragedy that nobody wants to see.” He added: “I recommend that everyone listens to their doctors, their health professionals on how to keep their kids safe.”
Cases climbing
Hamilton public health had confirmed six cases so far this year, Lew said, and none of those people was vaccinated. Earlier in May the agency warned of possible exposure at a grocery store, an apartment building and McMaster Children’s Hospital after four members of one household caught the virus.
Across Ontario there were 22 cases this year, according to PHO. That already matches the 2014 total, the recent high. All were in people born after 1970, 13 of them children, and 12 of those children were not immunized; the status of the other was unknown. Five unvaccinated children under five went to hospital. Fifteen of the 22 cases were tied to travel. Roughly 100 cases were recorded across the whole previous decade, so 2024 has reached nearly a quarter of that in a few months.
Why the youngest are exposed
Dr. Allison McGeer of Sinai Health System in Toronto called the death a tragedy but no surprise. “There’s also a certain aspect of inevitability to it just because of how much ground we lost in measles vaccination around the world,” she said. “If you look at the data from any of the provinces, it’s unvaccinated kids who are the problem.”
The numbers back her up. PHO’s March report found the share of seven-year-olds in Ontario with zero vaccine doses rose from less than four per cent to nearly 17 per cent between the 2019-2020 season and 2022-2023. Dr. Isaac Bogoch of Toronto General Hospital pointed to the pandemic, when many programs were curtailed and some young children missed a dose.
Canadian children get the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine at 12 to 15 months, with a second dose at 18 months or later, no later than around school entry. That leaves a gap for infants. One shot is thought to be effective upwards of 85 per cent of the time; the full set is nearly 100 per cent. Measles can linger in the air for hours, and one infected person can pass it to nine out of 10 unprotected people nearby.
Dr. Caroline Quach-Thanh, a pediatrician at the University of Montreal, put the death rate at one to three in every 1,000 reported cases. “The vaccine is extremely effective,” Bogoch said. “It’s safe, it’s widely available, and it’s free.”
Sources
- Ontario child's death from measles is 1st in province since 1989, public health says | CBC News
- When measles rears its head, young, unvaccinated children bear the brunt of the disease | CBC News
