Dr. Serge Melanson, President of the New Brunswick Medical Society. (submitted)
The New Brunswick Medical Society encourages updating vaccinations after two confirmed cases of measles in the Saint John area.
Dr. Serge Melanson says vaccines are the easiest way to protect against these communicable diseases and the more it happens the more protected people are.
Melanson says the local outbreak in Saint John speaks to vaccine hesitancy.
“Folks reluctant to get their vaccine. The World Health Organization published a position where they believe vaccine hesitancy in developed countries is one of the leading issues putting people’s health at risk globally.”
Melanson says living in Canada we benefit from not being exposed to a lot of these pathogens on a regular basis but, we know they are out there and we should be mindful and keep our vaccinations up to date.
As a practicing emergency room doctor, he sees patients coming in during a local outbreak with concerns adding ER’s have protocols in place to deal with infectious diseases starting in triage.
“This health care professional can quickly identify who could potentially be at risk and if they are in the ER department there are means of quarantining these folks in special rooms with protective equipment to make sure they don’t spread that amongst the folks in the rest of the ER department.”
He says when you have this out in the community, folks are going to ask appropriate questions about whether they could be experiencing this.
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