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A new poll released Friday by Mainstreet Technologies also found that 15% of Ontarians disagree that a reduction in the vaccination of children would have serious health impacts.

Dr. Natasha Crowcroft, chief of infectious disease for Public Health Ontario, said she wasn’t surprised there are still supporters of the anti-vaccine movement.

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The Abekahs also say children who are vaccinated carry a virus for at least 30 days and thus, could pass it on to other children. But that’s not an issue at their home daycare, they say, because none of the children have been vaccinated.

Ottawa Public Health’s program manager for vaccine preventable diseases questioned the basis of that assertion. “You can’t give the disease to someone else because you were vaccinated,” said Marie-Claude Turcotte.

“Ottawa Public Health would not encourage a vaccine-free environment,” she added.

Turcotte said measles is a highly transmittable disease that can have serious side-effects. A vaccine-free environment could potentially be at a higher risk because the measles virus would circulate quickly among the children.

“If one child in that daycare had measles, most likely all the others would too,” she said.

The existence of the Orléans centre comes at a time when some believe that parents who are choosing not to vaccinate their children against measles are contributing the recent outbreaks.

No measles cases have been reported in Ottawa, according to the public health department, but there are six confirmed cases in Toronto.