TORONTO – Toronto Public Health is supposed to track how many kids in the city’s nurseries are vaccinated against measles and other infectious diseases – but they don’t. They don’t have the money.
The health agency wants to, but it has repeatedly been denied the money required to do so.
“We don’t have that program. We don’t have that oversight,” Dr. David McKeown, the city’s chief medical officer of health told reporters at city hall Wednesday.
Toronto Public Health tracks the number of schoolchildren between kindergarten and Grade 12 who have been vaccinated as mandated by the Immunization of School Pupils Act. The same legislation also requires the agency to track kids in nurseries but they’ve repeatedly been denied the resources to do so.
“That program does not operate here in Toronto,” McKeown said.
“It’s never been included in our budget; we’ve tried in previous years to ask for the resources to implement this program. It’s really one of the few areas in which we’re not compliant with the Ontario public health standards.”
Mayor John Tory told reporters he wasn’t aware the city wasn’t complying with provincial regulations, saying he plans to support including the money in the upcoming budget.
“Well I would certainly be supportive of that, I think it’s necessary to do that,” Tory said. “Again I would say in a budget of $240 million it shouldn’t be too hard to find that money.”
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The agency asked the city for $40,000 to fund the initial stages of the program in their budget request this year. That would only cover 25 per cent of the funding needed. The other 75 per cent would be requested from the province.
That request is currently before the Budget Committee.
Toronto has 900 city daycares for kids up to the age of 3.
McKeown suggests the eight measles cases in Ontario, six of which are in Toronto, strengthen the argument for funding program. But he noted there haven’t been many measles cases at nurseries. One YMCA daycare was put on alert this week when an adult with measles could have exposed the children there, most of whom are too young to have had a booster shot.
Two other people, one in York Region, and another in Niagara, have also been diagnosed with measles.
For the most part Toronto does have a high vaccination rate. According to Public Health data, nearly 90 per cent of kids at Toronto schools were vaccinated in the 2011/2012 school year. However some schools, particularly in the downtown core, had far fewer kids vaccinated. And many have vaccination rates below the herd immunity level needed to keep vulnerable or immunocompromised people safe.
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