Canada's most populous province is fighting a measles outbreak even bigger than the one in Texas and New Mexico. Public Health Ontario said Thursday that more than 100 new cases were reported in the last week, bringing the total of confirmed and probable cases reported since October to 572, reports CP24. The sharp rise is "due to continued exposures and transmission among individuals who have not been immunized," the health agency said. Dozens more cases have been reported in other provinces, making the outbreak the country's largest since 2011. No deaths have been reported but authorities in Ontario say 42 measles patients, most of them unvaccinated children, have been hospitalized, including two in intensive care.
As in the Texas and New Mexico outbreak, many measles patients in Canada are from Mennonite communities. "Cases could spread in any unvaccinated community or population but are disproportionately affecting some Mennonite, Amish, and other Anabaptist communities due to a combination of under-immunization and exposure to measles in certain areas," Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario's chief health officer, wrote to provincial health units earlier this month, per Global News. He said the Ontario outbreak had been traced "back to an exposure at a large gathering with guests from Mennonite communities in New Brunswick last fall."
Marlene Epp, who directed the Mennonite studies program at the University of Waterloo, tells the Globe and Mail that the church doesn't ban vaccination, but the community has a long history of rejecting what it considers to be government meddling, and vaccine mandates during the pandemic increased skepticism about vaccines in general. "There's a whole set of protocols that emerged in COVID that were highly problematic for conservative Mennonite communities," Epp says, especially the closing of churches, schools, and church-related social gatherings. (More measles stories.)
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