Alberta Health Services (AHS) has declared a pertussis outbreak in its south zone for the fifth time in a decade.
Pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough, can be prevented by childhood immunization, but the region’s vaccination rates are quite low in some areas.
“It’s heterogenous – is probably the best way to explain our vaccine coverage, because in some areas there’s very good coverage and in other areas not so much. There are pockets of areas where there are groups or communities that don’t vaccinate,” said Dr. Lizette Elumir, Zone Medical Officer of Health for the south.
According to Vaccines.gov, when a population has a very high immunization rate, it benefits from herd immunity.
Herd immunity makes it more difficult for a virus to spread from person to person, so the entire community is less likely to catch the disease.
“If there’s not enough people in a population being immunized, we know that disease can spread, and pertussis is highly contagious, so we need a large proportion of the population to be immunized to keep it out,” said Shannon Vandenberg, nursing instructor at the University of Lethbridge.
The most tragic part about these outbreaks is that often the victims are infants too young to be immunized.
“Those are the ones – if they were ever to get pertussis could get extremely sick, hospitalized, death is a possibility and we did have a death in the south zone a few years ago… of an infant,” said Elumir.
The reason the south zone experiences a high number of outbreaks is because the immunization rate is not high enough to create a herd immunity, according to Vandenberg.
“I think it’s easier to believe stories about what happened to someone, rather than look at the science and look at how many cases do we actually see of reactions,” said the nursing instructor.
Alliyah Richards, a fourth-year nursing student at the U of L, added people continue to mistakenly believe vaccines cause autism, despite the article being proven false and the author’s medical license being taken away.
Pertussis is responsible for approximately 400,000 deaths worldwide every year, and is one of the leading cause of death among non-immunized children, according to the Canadian government.
The World Health Organization estimated 687,000 deaths were prevented by pertussis immunization around the world.
A 2017 survey showed 76 per cent of Canadian children had received all four recommended doses of the DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) vaccine by the time they were about two-years-old.
When you compare that number to Lethbridge County’s 2017 rate of 64.5 per cent, according to Alberta Health, the region does seem to be lagging behind much of the nation.
“It’s not … necessarily tied to religion, but for some people it’s the belief that if their child would become sick it would be by the hand of God. God allowed their child to get sick, so they take it as it just happens because that was God’s will,” said Vandenberg, adding there is nothing explicit in those communities’ religious beliefs that forbids immunization.
Alberta’s south zone experienced a pertussis outbreak in 2017 which resulted in more than 450 cases, but thankfully no fatalities.
“I think that’s one of the things we don’t stress enough, but we do have control over an outbreak. Outbreaks don’t just happen spontaneously. Outbreaks happen because we spread it amongst each other,” said Elumir.