Dr. Kim Barker (left) and Dr. Jennifer Russell (right) announced Monday that the measles outbreak is official over.
Provincial health officials have declared the measles outbreak in the Saint John region over.
12 cases were confirmed during the outbreak, with the last confirmed case on May 31st. Most cases were spread at the Kennebecasis Valley and Hampton High Schools.
Regional health officer Dr. Kim Barker says cooperation with the Anglophone South School District was key in keeping the disease from spreading further.
“We were able to go into the schools on a Saturday night, Sunday night, get everything ready for vaccination clinics the next morning, and vaccinate sometimes 850, 900 students a day. So that really was the most successful component of this,” she said.
“The biggest challenge of all was that the exposures were not in small households, but rather in emergency room settings and subsequently at two of our largest high schools,” said Barker.
Over 15,800 vaccines were distributed during the outbreak, and 7,500 potentially exposed people were traced and contacted. Barker says the scope and speed of their response was also remarkable.
“This was indeed a very, very extensive response,” she said.
“Many other jurisdictions would not have had the capacity to be able to respond aggressively like we did through mass vaccination campaigns and wide scale communication to the public.”
Debbie Godlewski, the director of Public Health Saint John says “this was an all-hands on deck” situation, with over 1,000 people involved, both from and outside of the region’s public health system.
“We had nurses from St. Stephen, St. George, and Sussex,” she said, all who were helping administer vaccines and give Saint John nurses breaks.
There was also an extensive number of filed pulled from school records to determine which students needed second and third doses of vaccines. Barker says this was a very time-consuming project.
She says the department of health is hoping to implement a digital health record system, so they don’t have to do as much “paper pulling” in the future.
“We’re looking forward to having an electronic registry which will actually capture everyone’s vaccines over a period of time, so that we’re not being forced, which we had to do in this outbreak, which was go in on a weekend to high schools and pulling charts,” she said.
That system will be fully adopted in the next two years.
Barker explains the measles outbreak began April 26th as a result of travel, then spread to 11 other individuals in the region.
She says “it would come as no surprise” to see another case, especially with the rise of immigration global travel.
“People aren’t going to stop travelling, I think we need to be reasonable about that. What we’re trying to do is make sure that when we do travel, that we are protected as we possibly can, and certainly we’re promoting a second dose of vaccine for adults who didn’t not get it as a child,” she said.
Barker also asks that people be vigilant, and research what potential diseases exist in the areas they are travelling, to avoid another outbreak in the future.
