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Canada badly needs a cross-country vaccination strategy, including keeping track of who has been vaccinated, according to an editorial in a prominent journal.
The piece published on Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal comes as some provinces finally begin rolling out parts of a national public health surveillance system that was called for more than a decade ago after the SARS outbreak.
“Though certain illnesses might respect geographic boundaries, measles will not remain within provincial borders, because it has such a high transmissibility. It must be managed and monitored with a national solution,” author Dr. Gordon Giddings wrote.
“We must emphasize that there is absolutely no scientific controversy about the effectiveness or safety of childhood vaccines, particularly the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine,” he said.
He added there has been a significant fall in the number of parents vaccinating their children, in part because they believe “dangerous, incomplete information” on the Internet, which is a “haven for unsubstantiated anti-vaccine opinion.”
“The simple fact is that low vaccination rates are contributing to preventable disease outbreaks,” he wrote.
Unless there are more educational campaigns and a national strategy, “Canadians can expect to see more measles outbreaks.”
Agencies/Canadajournal
