Jenn

True information framed in such a way to precisely give you the incorrect view of things.

In this post I will make two arguments.

First, yes, it is the Mennonites that began, and are the biggest victims of, the biggest measles outbreak of the current century, and second, thinking of them as resistant to vaccination is actively harmful to the work of eliminating measles from Canada once again.

I've been following the measles outbreak closely for basically its entire duration, because I have a subscription to my local newspaper, the Waterloo Record.

The writers there do frequent updates on the outbreak, often with higher quality and more detail than you get in the national papers.

This is because Waterloo region has a significant Mennonite population, so shit sometimes got real scuffed.

Like, over last spring, there were fairly regular advisories about local stores we shouldn't go into or quarantine if we did because someone with measles went in.

One of them was the pharmacy across the street from the university campus, so that was fun.

There's an image here.

Description.

Heading.

The Mennonite outbreak.

Here is what the outbreak looks like, Canada-wide.

There's an image here.

Health Canada.

Full offence to Health Canada.

This is a terrible graphic, because if you don't look at it carefully you will think that the provinces in dark blue have approximately the same number of cases, and this is very false.

SaskSatuan has barely over 100, Alberta has almost 2,000, and Ontario has almost 2,400 cases.

What's the deal with Ontario and Alberta?

Some of it comes down to the numbers game.