Montreal health officials look to reverse decline of routine childhood vaccinations | 24CA News

Montreal Public Health has launched a marketing campaign to remind mother and father to confirm their kid’s vaccination standing, particularly for these six and underneath.

A rising variety of youngsters have but to be inoculated towards harmful illnesses like measles, mumps, whooping cough and rubella, stated Benoît Corriveau, a resident physician with the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal.

“It’s around 80 per cent when, for a lot of diseases, we need at least 95 per cent of people to be immunized to have herd immunity to prevent outbreaks from happening,” he stated.

This lack of immunity comes at a time when pediatric care is already stretched skinny by the overwhelming variety of sufferers.

“Public health is concerned that, on top of the stress that is already on pediatric hospitals and schools, we could also experience outbreaks of other diseases that can be prevented by vaccination, ” said Corriveau.

These diseases can sometimes lead to serious complications for kids, he said. Corriveau said parents can check their child’s vaccination status by calling 811 or going on the city’s public health website. To book appointments, parents can rely on the scheduling website, clicsante and selecting the option: children vaccination.

According to federal data, three cases of measles — and no cases of rubella — have been reported in Canada in 2022. But each year in Canada between 1,000 and 3,000 people fall ill from pertussis, also known as whooping cough. 

Mumps outbreaks have cropped up in different parts of the country in recent years.

Vaccinations are free, safe, effective

Montreal Public Health’s vaccination campaign hopes to see more toddlers inoculated.

It says in a news release that, according to its latest estimates, measles vaccination coverage in Montreal is between 80 and 85 per cent among kindergarten-age children — below the target rate of 95 per cent, to prevent transmission of the disease.

The immunization schedule for children six years old and under helps protect against several serious disease complications, including meningitis and polio, the release says.

“It is exactly because of vaccination that many of those illnesses have nearly disappeared in Quebec,” it says. “Vaccines are free, protected and efficient in stopping severe problems from these infections.”

Giving the vaccines at the recommended age improves the protection, the health authority says, but it’s never too late to make an appointment.

WHO says issue is global

Vaccination rates have dropped off by several percentage points in some provinces, but Canada isn’t the only country affected by the decline.

The World Health Organization issued a warning over the summer of 2021, saying 23 million children missed out on basic childhood vaccines through routine health services in 2020, the highest number since 2009 and 3.7 million more than in 2019.

“Multiple illness outbreaks could be catastrophic for communities and well being techniques already battling COVID-19, making it extra pressing than ever to spend money on childhood vaccination and guarantee each baby is reached,” said the WHO’s director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in a news release.

Then, in August, Dr. Fatima Kakkar, an infectious diseases pediatrician and pediatrics professor at the Université de Montréal, said she was seeing children who have never even had a tetanus shot. 

She said it’s “shocking to see what number of” are without the protection.

“For probably the most half, it is youthful youngsters who missed their common appointments throughout peak pandemic time and have simply by no means caught up,” she stated.