Thank you, Danielle Smith! We are No. 1!
In fact, congratulations to the whole United Conservative Party team.
Alberta wouldn’t be at the top today without your hard work. We are the champions!
Unfortunately, this isn’t a contest you’d think anyone would want to win.
The number of reported measles cases in Alberta now exceeds those in the entire United States, and, as we all know, Donald Trump’s America is no slouch when it comes to ignoring sensible public health measures and spreading ridiculous lies about vaccines and immunization.
But when it comes to spreading infection, Premier Danielle Smith’s Alberta punches above its weight.
As of today at lunchtime, media reported early this afternoon, the number of reported cases of the highly infectious disease had reached 1,314. That’s a rate of about 26 cases per 100,000 population.
Meanwhile in the latest reporting period by World Health Organization passed onward by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the CBC said, the MAGA colossus immediately to our south, with a population 68 times that of Alberta, had managed to post only a measly 1,288 cases – about 0.4 cases per 100,000.
Most of those have been in Texas, which, as UCP politicians always like to remind us, has a lot in common with Alberta – including far-right politics and bad government, as it happens.
With 3,053 cases reported in all of Canada, including those in Alberta, the national incidence rate is about 7.6 per 100,000. Mexico, has about 2 cases per 100,000.
So, without a doubt, we appear to be the leaders in the race to the bottom of the public health barrel on the North American continent.
Looking farther afield, though, several nations, including Yemen, India, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan posted larger numbers of cases, the CDC said, but most of them reported smaller numbers of cases per 100,000 – about 0.7 for India and 3.4 for Pakistan, for example.
But, hey, maybe reporting in those countries, and the United States too, isn’t as good as it is in Alberta! A word to the wise, dear readers: Don’t count on it.
Yemen has reported the largest number of measles cases for any country in the world (15,683), according to the WHO, a rate of about 39 per 100,000, according to me and the online incidence-rate calculator I found. Kyrgyzstan had a total of 8,487 cases, working about to almost 120 per 100,000.
So we may not be No. 1 in the world – just yet – but we’re a contender.
Chaos in our health care system is undoubtedly helping, as is the UCP’s laser focus on destroying and privatizing the most efficient public health care agency in Canada instead of fixing the real problems in health care.
But more than anything else, the spread is being enabled Premier Smith’s public suspicion of vaccines, her government’s refusal to allow public health officials to promote their use or even to talk about them, and even its now obvious efforts to slow-walk access to the measles vaccine everywhere except the hardest hit rural areas where immunization rates are lowest.
Take a bow, Ms. Smith. RFK Jr. must be envious.
Next up, this fall, the return of COVID-19 and influenza. The Smith Government’s plan to limit, restrict, and refuse to provide the vaccines for both diseases to thousands of Albertans – plus to make seniors pay a steep fee for the COVID shot – should encourage the spread of those diseases as well.
After that, who knows? Polio, maybe?
Useless Crazy Pigheaded………UCP
Ughhh. There is nothing more to say. This UCP is dangerously close to the bottom of social responsibility and high on the level of corporate subsidy (welfare). The UCP political ideology baffles me. They seem to be declaring war on the most vulnerable segments of society, destroying our excellent and world-class education and health care systems while micro-managing every segment of government with no plan in place for what to do once they have control.
This doesn’t even meet the understood criteria of nazism. It goes further.
Premier Polio. I can hardly wait.
I don’t like to say I told you so, especially under these circumstances (I believe it was March 9th??) …and given that it was in Texas and the GOP’S disregard for actual numbers…I’m shall we say, a wee bit skeptical of what they are saying, especially now with Jr. in charge. Which reminds me Ms Lagrange might want to rethink using him as a reference for ‘anything’, since he admitted in the congressional hearings that he used AI to publish his “findings report that was not fact checked, and did not belong to real people “.
And if you think that the numbers are bad now, just wait 2 weeks, when the greatest show on earth will probably get world wide attention all right.
Can’t say I understand Danni the Ditz at all on this issue. What disease long banished is next? Polio, TB, diphtheria, or whooping cough? Black Death? Oh well, modern science is so damn difficult.
I read a comment about 2 months ago, on LinkedIn or MSN, where a UPC supporter said “the measles outbreak is just Liberal propaganda.” Unfortunately, he probably still has the same mindset.
There is a bigger context to the authoritarian crazy in Alberta. China’s gasoline demand has hit its peak, and the price of the very best Alberta crude has been steadily falling since 2022. Add in inflation and you can see why the small-cap oil guys want to impose an American backed dictatorship and loot the CPP and whatever else they can lay their hands on. Meanwhile Ottawa keeps us behind a 100% tariff barrier with China.
Carney may have a Ph.D. in Economics from Oxford, but the good ole boys have already buffaloed him into building another pipeline or two and pulling a Redford by ignoring our laws to do so. It is obvious from Smith’s increasingly unhinged behavior (she is the Queen of Measles, establishing a Provincial police force under political control, the suspension of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the incarceration of people in ‘treatment centers’, making her demands “non-negotiable” etc.) that there is no appeasing the UCP.
Correct on all accounts……when I fill up these days I always add 13 cents per litre…….that way I always remember the maggots gouging me…….the same old boys club…..
Well there’s another thing you miss if you ban the books. The effects of viral disease before vaccines or antibiotics as illustrated in ‘Anne of Green Gables’, for example.
Probably a good thing the people who get unnerved about the books don’t actually read them. If you further peruse the fiction of L. M. Montgomery, you would discover a whole world of themes beyond ‘bosom friends’.
Jingoism. The ravages of war. Indigenous relations in colonial Canada. Religious non-conformity. Anti-catholicism. The patriarchy. Coping with disability before universal healthcare. Eco-feminism. American politics. Canadian nationalism. The stigma of the unwed mother. Predestination. Child abuse. Conscription. The romanticization of tuberculosis. Inherited mental illness. Puritanism. Women in higher education. White Protestant privilege in Upper Canada. Addiction. Corporal punishment. The ruin of a run on a bank and its collapse. French-Canadian poverty and emigration. Women’s suffrage. The shame visited on conscientious objectors. The settlement of western Canada. There’s even a jovial Montreal millionaire who’s made his fortune peddling quack medicine.
I’ve not written or read a thesis on the ‘Anne’ books, just memorized whole chunks. It’s just stuff. About things people say and do and think.
The other day, when questioned on CBC’s As It Happens, Mr. Nicolaides couldn’t think of a single name of a book he had read as a child. He did say he read history as a youngster.
Maybe time for the UCP caucus to review some of those history books, rather than denying our children both modern medicine and literature.
Public Health” is a very important part of the health care system- undoubtedly the most fundamental part of it- and when you, “they”, as in the UCP, decide to shoot the whole thing to smithereens the consequences include the spread of communicable diseases. When the Dr. Deena Hinshaws are burned at the stake like they are in Alberta, and the David Parkers dictate that public health measures are to be deep-sixed, then you ignite something you can’t control- and can’t ignore. Especially as the body count climbs, and worst of all, if they are little ones. Covid carried away millions of elderly in its heyday but like Jason Kenney essentially said in the Leg, too bad so sad. They were old and going to die anyway.
But, “measles” aka Red Measles aka Roseola is a vile, highly contagious, and dangerous virus for children to get, and that is why a vaccine was invented to protect them from it and eradicate the disease. And why so many public health doctors and nurses worked so doggedly from when the vaccine was introduced in the 1960’s to the mid-’90’s when Canada had no cases, but for those imported. So. Much. Work. Dedication. Keeping their eyes on the target- 95% vaccination rates (or higher!) by the time the kiddies started kindergarten. Alberta public health districts would have informal competitions to see who could get the best immunization rates. A source of pride, and accomplishment. High fives all ’round the public health clinics between sips of celebratory coffee when the weekly reports came in. When we had reports. When we kept data. Sent in envelopes by courier and pneumatic tubes.
Remember smallpox? No? Guess why? VACCINE. The horrifying, pustular, infectious
scourge that wiped out swaths of human populations, rich and poor, worldwide for centuries. Entire tribes of indigenous peoples fell ill and died when the Europeans introduced smallpox to the “New World”. Then, VACCINE and the disease was eradicated, from the planet. The UCP should have that word tattooed on their Neanderthal foreheads.
Make no mistake, even though the UCP probably takes immense pride in Alberta’s new status as the Measles capital of North America, other jurisdictions including our own federal one, must be beside themselves wondering how to put pressure on these dilwads to take decisive action and get a handle on this unbelievable and out of control situation.
As you cited, even in the U.S.A. where their chief health guy is an anti-vax nut-job their measles rates are nothing like what we have in Alberta. A couple of American public health doctors, specialists in the control of communicable disease, have a weekly blog called, “Your Local Epidemiologist” where they give updates on what’s what disease-wise in the U.S. The latest? Plague. Yes, you read that right. In Arizona (another Alberta parallel universe) a person has died of pneumonic plague- the very one that ran rampant through 14th Century Europe transmitted by the teensiest of pests- fleas. That very Plague the Monty Python’s gang spoofed with the “Bring out your dead!” sketch. The carts being toted up and down the dark cobblestone streets of the villages and people hauling out the bodies of their family members, and the one body on the cart, “I’m not dead yet!” Hilarious. But, not really.
Quoting from the American doctors’ blog, about the appropriate response to the case of pneumonic plague in Arizona,
“What does this mean? Simple precautions are needed in endemic areas: don’t handle wild or dead rodents, use DEET to prevent flea bites, and keep pets on flea prevention. This is also a reminder of why public health surveillance matters. Some diseases never disappear entirely, but awareness and timely care save lives.”
We need our provincial government in Alberta to put a priority on getting the measles under control STAT. They need to put the experts and knowledgeable health care staff back in charge of a mass program, and dedicate the resources to protect our children. They need to endorse vital public health measures like vaccination and acknowledge its importance. Not to mention, measles isn’t the only disease lurking out there, just waiting for a ripe, unprotected population to decimate. It will take a lot of work to bring this fiasco under control. But it has been done. We can do it again.
A very dramatic comment when all you had to say was childhood vaccines need to be mandatory.
Only Ontario and NB have mandatory vaccine policies for school entry.
Not Roseola, I meant “Rubeola”.
The UCP has no concern for how many people get sick. Another Best Summer Ever.
We need to be waving one of those foam hands with the “we’re number one” finger sticking up, but one with red spots on it.
What does the UCP or the Alberta government have to do with a few door knobs that choose not to vaccinate their children for measles? I’m sure there were people that didn’t vaccinate their kids even when the NDP were in office.
Unless it is a mandatory vaccine, people have the choice unfortunately, and some choose to not do it.
The facts are that there are some cultures and religions that don’t vaccinate their children and now we are seeing the outcome of that.
Close to 80% of Albertans are vaccinated and then there are some of us that actually had it as kids so we are immune.
It is hardly Danielle Smith’s fault.
It is not the purpose of government to impose or suggest medical procedures which are not in keeping with current medical standards or impose their religious beliefs upon the citizens of the province which could result in severe illness or death. If Canada is going to have provincial or municipal governments who do not adhere to “best practises”, ie. vaccinate children and adults as needed then it may be time the federal government determines what the game rules ought to be for the country.
People do have the right to determine whether or not they will have a vaccination. People have the right to not come into contact with those who have measles due to not vaccinating. Those people’s rights need to be respected. They have the right to not be made sick by the unvaccinated and not to die due to having aquired measles from the unvaccinated.