Dr. Victoria Lee and her colleagues saw measles coming well before it struck B.C.’s eastern Fraser Valley last March. The virus was headed their way like a runaway train careening down a track—and hundreds of people were standing between the rails, refusing to budge. Anti-immunization beliefs flourish in many of the small religious communities that dot the countryside in what’s known as B.C.’s Bible Belt.
By the time Fraser Health declared the outbreak over, four weeks later, more than 400 people had fallen ill. Most of the patients were young—the average age was 11. No one died, but there were serious complications: three cases of pneumonia, one incident of encephalitis , and a report of fever-induced seizures.
Anti-immunization enclaves like those in B.C.’s Bible Belt are a chink in the immunization armour that shields Canadians from devastating epidemics. But at least they are easy to find and isolate. As worries about vaccines have begun to spread into the mainstream, however—propelled by Hollywood celebrities, conspiracy theorists and practitioners of alternative medicine—other less fixable weaknesses are being exposed.
The practice of deliberately exposing ourselves to diseases to build up an immunity has been around for at least a thousand years. Modern vaccines can trace their roots to Edward Jenner, an English physician who began using cowpox—a disease that milkmaids got from infected udders—to protect against deadly smallpox in 1796. But the idea of inviting a small illness into the body to fend off a greater one has never found full acceptance.
In a way, the concerns and backsliding we are now seeing now are measures of our public health success. More than a generation removed from widespread epidemics of vaccine-preventable diseases, anti-immunization crusaders are able to focus on the exceptions, not the rules. “The anti-vax movement is so good, frankly, at telling heart-wrenching stories,” says Shelley Deeks, head of vaccine-preventable diseases at Public Health Ontario.
Kahan’s study of anti-vaxxers, which also looked at communication strategies, identified an even more troubling problem. All the public education campaigns and media reports actually appear to be undermining immunization efforts by causing people to overestimate the number of exemptions being granted.
The failure to follow through on promises of a national database underscores other problems in the system. There could well be a pocket of jaw-droppingly low vaccination coverage in your city or even neighbourhood, but there’s no way to know for sure. “We don’t have that information in our database, and unfortunately, there are very few jurisdictions, if any, that have the ability to get down to that level,” says Spika.
Somehow the issue of the flu vaccine needs to be addressed. It’s not very effective, we largely vaccinate the wrong people, no one will discuss the cost - and I worry that this crappy vaccine muddies the water for the really important ones. But does it get a lot of airtime!
In Ontario you only sign a paper to skip vaccination. Easy. Easy solution, legislate no vaccination you home school or use private daycare. It's right there for politicians to act. No more ed campaigns!
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