Ontario high school closes after measles exposure reported on campus
In a release, the Waterloo Region District School Board said that there were exposures on campus at Eastwood Collegiate Institute on May 7 and 8.
It said the school was closed to allow for Public Health to complete the required steps in vaccination verification, but did not offer when the school would reopen.
'In an effort to ensure the safety and well-being of students and staff and working collaboration with Region of Waterloo Public Health, Eastwood Collegiate Institute (ECI) is closed to in-person learning on May 15, 2025,' WRDSB director of education Scott Miller said in a statement issued to Global News.
David Aoki, director of infectious diseases, told Global News how vaccination verification works beginning with positive results being reported to Public Health through health care providers and laboratories.
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'We then follow up with the person to collect information and determine if others may have been exposed,' he explained.
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'Once we have identified others, or other settings, we follow up with those persons or locations to identify others who may be at risk and notify them. We follow the same process for school exposures.'
He went on to say that WPH is currently confirming the vaccinations status of people who may have been exposed to the virus.
'We are verifying the vaccination status of those contacts who were exposed to the case to determine who may need to be excluded or who can return, for both staff and students,' Aoki offered.
'At this time, we only have one confirmed case associated with this exposure.'
Public Health Ontario provided its weekly update on the growing number of measles cases in Ontario on Thursday, saying that there were 181 more people who are now infected.
This brings the total case count in Ontario to 1,622 since an outbreak began in October, with 119 of those people having been hospitalized, including nine in intensive care.
The outbreak began at a large gathering with guests from Mennonite communities in New Brunswick last fall, with a large portion of the cases in Ontario occurring in the southwestern portion of the province.
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Ontario's chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore, told Global News last week that he remains confident things are under control.
'I still think it's stabilizing,' he said. 'We're roughly seeing, in terms of active cases in Ontario, 100 to 150 new cases every week. It is the most infectious agent known to humans and normally spreads from one unvaccinated person to roughly 16 — so we're not seeing that explosive, exponential growth.'
The province's outbreak is particularly affecting some Mennonite, Amish and other Anabaptist communities, which have lower vaccination rates. Moore said that, while the numbers in those communities were high, he's not seen evidence of wider community spread.
— with files from Global News' Isaac Callan & Colin D'Mello and The Canadian Press
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