Canada has lost its measles elimination status after nearly three decades due to its failure to curb a year-long outbreak, the Pan American Health Organization said on Monday, a loss that also results in the Americas region losing the status.
Health experts last month predicted the Pan American Health Organization would strip Canada of the elimination status.
Canada has logged 5,138 measles cases this year and two deaths. Both were babies who were exposed to the measles virus in the womb and born prematurely.
Photo: Reuters
“This represents a setback, but it is also reversible,” Pan American Health Organization director Jarbas Barbosa said.
Although the Americas region as a whole has also lost its elimination status, individual countries keep their status, he said.
Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay and the US are also facing active outbreaks.
“It’s a deeply disheartening development. It’s a deeply worrisome development, and, frankly, it’s an embarrassing development,” Brown University infectious disease expert Jennifer Nuzzo said. “No country with the amount of resources of Canada — or other countries in North America even — should lose their measles elimination status.”
Measles is a highly preventable disease when countries attain a 95 percent vaccination coverage rate. That is the level needed for a community to achieve herd immunity and protect those who are unable to receive the vaccine, which is 97 percent effective after two doses.
Canada eliminated measles in 1998, followed by the US two years later. After hugely successful vaccination campaigns, the Americas became the first region in the world to be free of measles in 2016. Health officials estimate the measles vaccine prevented 6.2 million deaths in the Americas between 2000 and 2023.
Large outbreaks in Venezuela and Brazil in 2018 and 2019 cost the region its elimination status, which it reclaimed last year, but ends again with Canada’s loss.
Spread of the virus, enabled by slipping vaccination rates in parts of Canada, is a harbinger of a resurgence of more vaccine-preventable illnesses in a population increasingly skeptical and mistrustful of vaccines since the COVID-19 pandemic, health experts said.
“As a region, we have eliminated measles twice,” Barbosa said. “We can do it a third time.”
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