A senior medical advisor with the Public Health Agency of Canada says the country could lose its measles elimination status if the highly contagious disease continues to spread into the fall.
Dr. Marina Salvadori warned of the possibility Thursday as cases in Ontario grew by nearly 200 infections, adding that would only occur if prolonged spread continued beyond mid-October 2025.
“That could happen. But I think that when people hear ‘lose elimination status,’ they have a lot of fear that measles will re-establish itself again and be common, and we will all be exposed to it through the next decades,” said Salvadori, noting it does not have to mean measles is here to stay.
Even if elimination status ends, “I do believe that we can eliminate measles again in our country,” she said.
Measles elimination is the absence of continuous disease transmission for 12 months or more in a geographic area. Canada achieved that status in 1998.
On Thursday, Public Health Ontario reported 197 more infections over the last week, bringing the province’s tally of probable and confirmed cases to 1,440 since an outbreak began in October.
Salvadori said public health officials have been meeting with the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention along with public health colleagues in Mexico over commonalities in the outbreak, which has struck all three countries.
“We’re all dealing with the same thing, and we’re all working really well together to help get insights and understand what’s going on,” she said.
In Ontario, there have been 101 hospitalizations, including 75 children, and eight patients have been in intensive care. Dr. Sarah Wilson, a public health physician at Public Health Ontario, noted hospitalizations represent seven per cent of Ontario’s outbreak cases.
“To me, that’s another really clear representation of how measles infections can have very severe complications and it absolutely is not a trivial infection,” said Wilson.
Alberta reported Thursday that its overall case count had reached 313 since mid-March, including 19 hospitalizations.
Saskatchewan updated its cumulative count Thursday to 27 cases. The province’s Chief Medical Health Officer Dr. Saqib Shahab said he expected to see new cases every day moving forward.
“We are now in Saskatchewan part of the unprecedented North American measles outbreak,” Shahab said at a news conference in Regina.
“We should not be seeing measles in 2025. That we are seeing some outbreaks in specific communities as if it was the 1950s means that the social contract of keeping each other safe and protected is broken.”
On Wednesday, Manitoba reported it had reached 24 cases. Nova Scotia and Northwest Territories each reported measles cases earlier this week, marking their first since this outbreak began.
— With files from Jeremy Simes in Regina
Comments