Canada is no longer measles-free, health authorities have declared, after 5,000 cases were recorded in a year.
The country lost its measles elimination status more than one year after the highly contagious virus started spreading, the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) said on Monday. It means the entire region of the Americas also loses its status.
Canada has seen a total of 5,138 cases logged this year, bringing an end to a 27-year measles-free status, a development which has been described by experts as “worrisome and embarrassing”.
It follows a fall in child vaccinations in Canada, with population-wide rates slipping below the 95 per cent coverage rate needed to stop outbreaks.
The Americas, including all 35 countries in North, Central and South America – along with the Caribbean – was previously the only area of the world that had successfully eliminated measles. It first gained the status in 2016, before losing it due to outbreaks in Venezuela and Brazil in 2018 and 2019. In 2024, it won back the designation.
A measles-free status is largely a symbolic designation which is issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to countries experiencing occasional travel-related cases or small, well-contained outbreaks that last less than a year. It is earned when a country shows it has stopped the continuous spread of the virus within local communities, though occasional cases might still arise linked to travel.
If one country in a WHO region suffers an outbreak for more than one year, the entire region loses its status.
Experts from PAHO, an independent health agency, made the determination after analysing data on Canada’s outbreaks that showed the virus has spread continuously for a year.
“It’s a deeply disheartening development. It’s a deeply worrisome development. And, frankly, it’s an embarrassing development,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a Brown University infectious disease expert.
“No country with the amount of resources of Canada – or other countries in North America even – should lose their measles elimination status.”
Fears are growing that the US could be the next to lose its status, after eliminating measles in 2000. It comes despite an end to a large outbreak that killed three and saw 900 fall ill across Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma earlier this year.
Outbreaks are ongoing in South Carolina and around towns in the Arizona-Utah border, with nearly 200 people having fallen ill.
US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has a long history of promoting debunked claims and misinformation about vaccination, earlier this year accepted that the measles outbreak was “serious”.
Mr Kennedy, who has promoted the discredited claim that childhood vaccinations cause autism, said in March that he recognises the “serious impact of this outbreak on families, children, and healthcare workers”, having previously described it as “not unusual”.
Measles usually begins with a high fever and a rash starting on the face and neck, and although most people recover, it remains one of the leading causes of death among young children, according to the WHO.
