Anyone who thinks their child will be safe from catching measles, even if they aren’t vaccinated, needs to think again.

More than 50 years after a safe, effective measles vaccine was invented, the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease is making a comeback around the world, including in countries where it was once thought to have been eradicated.

The World Health Organization says the resurgence was responsible for 10 million cases of measles and more than 140,000 deaths around the world in 2018. And by November of last year, numbers had tripled compared to the same period in previous years.

This is unacceptable and unforgivable considering that the disease, which can cause blindness, inflammation of the brain, pneumonia and even death, is completely preventable through the highly effective measles vaccine.

Indeed, the WHO says the vaccine saved 23 million lives between the years 2000 and 2018.

So why the resurgence? In part, because not every country has a public health system that is set up to vaccinate children.

But more incomprehensible is the fact it has to do with what the WHO calls “backsliding” in countries where people have become complacent or misinformed by an anti-vaccination movement about the importance of getting their children immunized.

The organization calls this “vaccine hesitancy,” and listed it last year as one of the top 10 threats to global health.

No wonder. The dangers of vaccine hesitancy for children are enormous. Not only is it driving down immunization rates for measles, but it is doing the same for everything from annual flu shots to HPV vaccinations, which protect against cervical cancer.

Anti-vax information is apparently as virulent as any disease. Spread through social media, it is now endemic in countries that had been declared measles-free, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, Romania and Russia.

North America is no exception. Though the United States was declared measles-free in 2016, the states of Washington and New York experienced outbreaks of the disease at the beginning of last year, leading Washington’s governor to declare a state of emergency.

That’s why Ontario should go further toward ensuring that as many children as possible are immunized against measles. The government should eliminate philosophical and religious exemptions for the vaccinations that children must have under the law to attend school, as has been done in Germany and several American states.

Ontario’s health minister, Christine Elliott, has refused to take this step, despite a request to implement it from Toronto’s board of health.

That puts children who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons, such as those who are receiving cancer treatments, at risk of catching measles from other children who have not been immunized.

This is especially true because of the alarmingly large numbers of children who remain unvaccinated in this province.

In the Greater Toronto Area alone, for example, the proportion of kids who aren’t getting their shots is 30 per cent. That creates the risk for an outbreak of measles, since 95 per cent of the population must be vaccinated to create what is known as herd immunity.

Ontario is not alone in refusing to tackle this problem head-on. UNICEF reported last year that 287,000 Canadian children born between 2010 and 2017 have gone unvaccinated for measles.

That’s the seventh-highest rate of non-vaccination among comparable high-income countries.

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As the WHO’s director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, says: “The fact that any child dies from a vaccine-preventable disease like measles is frankly an outrage and a collective failure to protect the world’s most vulnerable children.”

He is right.

The Ford government should rethink its policy on vaccination. The price to pay if it doesn’t act could be the completely preventable deaths of children.

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