Measles outbreak in N.B. renews interest in national vaccination registry

A measles outbreak in New Brunswick and a surge of cases across Canada has renewed calls for a national vaccination registry.

New Brunswick has 50 confirmed cases of the highly infectious respiratory disease, as of Thursday — all in health Zone 3, which includes Fredericton and parts of the Upper St. John River Valley area, and all linked to an initial travel-related case reported on Oct. 24.

The province's outbreak has pushed Canada's annual case count to 131, including the death of child under five in Hamilton, the highest number of cases the country has seen in a decade.

"It's definitely scary," said Dr. Joanne Langley, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax and a member of the Canadian Center for Vaccinology.

She believes creating a national registry where people could access their immunization records would help increase vaccine uptake, and reduce the incidence of measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases, along with the associated health-care costs. It would also allow health officials to assess coverage, effectiveness and safety.

"Lots of folks" have been working on the concept since the last measles outbreak in New Brunswick in 2019, during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent outbreaks of pneumococcal disease and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, said Langley, who is also a professor at Dalhousie University.

While individual provinces and territories have improved their registries, Canada's ability to integrate that data to get a national picture "is still quite far behind," she said.

"And that puts us at a deficit compared to other countries that have national vaccine programs where you can rapidly assess where the problems are, where you need to direct efforts and remediate those so that we're prepared for any infectious disease outbreak that's preventable by a vaccine."

Many European countries have such a system, said Tim Sly, an epidemiologist and professor emeritus in the School of Occupational and Public Health at Toronto Metropolitan University.

But in Canada, "We're rummaging in the kitchen drawer looking for a little yellow card for information about vaccines we might have received decades ago, when we may have been living in another province.

"That's no good," said Sly. "In this day of information technology, we need a national database to see who's been vaccinated."

This is particularly important for measles, which is highly contagious. At least 95 per cent of the population needs to be immunized with two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine to prevent spread, said Sly.

"We've let that drop to … 80 per cent in Canada, and this is why we're going to see more of these little sprouting outbreaks."

Ian Culbert, executive director of the Canadian Public Health Association, an independent advocate for public health based in Ottawa, contends a national vaccine database is "a crucial first step to saving our health-care system."