Northwest Territories says it’s closely monitoring its measles vaccine supply, while Nunavut is trying to boost immunization numbers in low-uptake areas as health departments in Canada’s North face down the virus that’s spreading in outbreaks across the country.
Dr. Kami Kandola, chief public health officer of the Northwest Territories, says most of her region’s measles vaccine supply was used in response to a recent multi-day exposure in Yellowknife tied to the region’s first infection, showing just how much one case can “wreak havoc” on a remote jurisdiction with limited resources.
She says more shots should arrive later this week, but in the meantime, she’s asking people to check their medical records to ensure they aren’t being vaccinated unnecessarily.
N.W.T.‘s health department says there is enough supply for those who were exposed, and to maintain routine vaccinations.
Last week the department warned of potential spread related to a case in which an unvaccinated person in Yellowknife got measles while travelling within the country.
This marked the first and so far the only measles case in Canada’s North, one of the few parts of the country that hasn’t experienced a measles outbreak this year. Ontario has seen 1,400 infections since October, and Alberta’s outbreak this year has sickened more than 360 people.
Kandola notes the case in Yellowknife was linked to a domestic flight, a frequent means of transportation for the North.
“If someone catches the fire on the plane and they come to a jurisdiction and there’s dry wood there, you can easily see how quickly it spreads. That’s how measles can be. It’s highly infectious, and if you don’t have enough people vaccinated, then you can have a rapid dissemination among risk groups,” says Kandola.
Vaccination rates in Northwest Territories for two-year-olds have dropped from 90 per cent in 2019 to 83 per cent as of May 1. But that coverage ranges — it’s as low as about 70 per cent and as high as 88 per cent in some areas, says Kandola, adding the target for herd immunity is 95 per cent.
Kandola said the lower end of the vaccination spectrum is often in the parts of the province that see the highest health staff shortages and vaccine hesitancy. Most of their communities outside of cities like Yellowknife and Fort Smith don’t have physicians based in them, and some don’t have nurses, which means they have to fly in.
“That’s the reality of living in the North,” she says.
In Nunavut, there are some places where the vaccination rate is as low as 50 per cent, says Dr. Ekua Agyemang, the territory’s chief public health officer. It would be a “serious situation” if measles entered one of those communities, especially if many of the unvaccinated are children.
“There are communities where there’s a high level of mistrust of the government health-care system, which makes it difficult for people to take up vaccination,” she says, referring to the enduring trauma of colonization.
However, there’s a wide range of measles vaccine coverage in Nunavut, Agyemang notes, which can be as high as 95 per cent in other areas.
To approach vaccine hesitancy, she meets with religious leaders to ask for their support and trusted voice to spread the message. Nunavut also holds draws for Ski-Doos and bicycles that people can enter if they get vaccinated.
She says the province’s supply of measles shots is adequate, and so does Yukon’s Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Sudit Ranade.
“The challenge becomes if there’s a draw on the same system from multiple places at the same time, right? And so we all get our, certainly for this immunization, we get it from the same supply chain as everyone else does. And so if there’s a draw on that from lots of places at the same time, it could make it harder for us to meet the demand later,” says Ranade.
In the Yukon, Ranade says he’s been running through the action plan for managing contact tracing and boosting immunization efforts if an outbreak does occur.
“If we were to get lots and lots of cases and they needed lots and lots of care, it would exacerbate some situations that we might already have in terms of our health-care resources,” he says.
That includes a set number of hospital beds for pediatric patients, says Ranade. But he’s aiming to be as prepared as possible in the hopes of controlling the spread before it ever reaches that point.
“We don’t necessarily expect that all of those beds are going to be filled with cases of measles at any given time. And if that happens, then that might actually crowd out our ability to care for other pediatric cases that need it,” says Ranade.
“If you get a sudden volume of people who are sick with something, then your fixed health care system constraints are going to get overloaded very quickly.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 13, 2025.
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