Good morning. Our health team has been on the ground as measles cases surge in Ontario and Alberta – more on that below, along with a name change for Hudson’s Bay and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on youth gender-affirming care. But first:

Today’s headlines

• President Donald Trump won’t say whether he has decided to order a U.S. strike on Iran
• Mark Carney won’t say if he raised India’s role in the murder of a Canadian Sikh separatist leader with PM Narendra Modi
• Canada’s temporary resident population tumbles as new rules take hold

Hi, I’m Caroline Alphonso, The Globe’s health editor. It was a given that my two children would receive their routine childhood immunizations, including the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. I would have expected that most of their classmates in Toronto had also received it, but the city’s measles vaccination rate among seven-year-olds was 69 per cent in the 2023-2024 school year, slightly lower than the dismal provincial average of 70.4 per cent. Herd immunity against measles requires 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated.

Measles was declared eliminated in Canada in 1998. The MMR vaccine has been in routine use in Canada for several decades and is considered safe and effective. Yet we find ourselves in a situation where vaccination rates are steadily dropping and measles cases are skyrocketing in my home province (more than 2,000 cases associated with an outbreak that began in the fall) and in Alberta (more than 950 cases). Most of the cases are unimmunized children. And we recently learned that a premature newborn baby infected with measles in utero died in Southwestern Ontario – the first death in the current outbreak.

The measles outbreak in Ontario has been traced back to a large Mennonite gathering in New Brunswick last fall, according to Ontario’s chief medical officer of health. Cases have also turned up in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec. This is the worst year for measles in Canada since 2011, when 751 cases were mostly linked to an outbreak in Quebec.

As you can imagine, measles has been a topic of conversation in our weekly health meetings – at times taking over the discussion.

How do we keep our readers up to date on what’s happening? How should we tell stories on the ground? Where is this country headed when a virus makes a resurgence? What does public health’s changing role look like? And, finally, how do we protect children?

Our reporters, myself included, covered the COVID-19 pandemic (I was The Globe’s education reporter at the time). Now we find ourselves reporting on a virus that many doctors have never seen other than in textbooks. My colleague Kristy Kirkup wrote about how organizations, including the Canadian Paediatric Society, are racing to convene online webinars to help doctors identify the virus. More than 900 people attended.

Our senior health reporter, Kelly Grant, has visited Southwestern Ontario – the epicentre of the province’s outbreak – twice now to give readers a deeper understanding of how locals are dealing with measles cases and the death of the newborn. The reaction is surprisingly mixed: Some have vaccinated their children. Others have pointed to the fact that the baby suffered from additional medical complications, which, to their mind at least, means measles isn’t so bad. Seeing so many children recover from measles, as most do, has also contributed to a feeling among some in the area that public health has overhyped the threat of the virus.

The sad reality is that we are having trouble containing the outbreak here in Canada. For her new piece from southern Alberta, health reporter Alanna Smith visited the municipal district of Taber, which sits at the epicentre of the outbreak. Some people she spoke with seemed oblivious to the virus making a resurgence.

That’s concerning. Canada is at risk of losing its elimination status in the fall if it doesn’t contain the outbreak. (Measles elimination is only achieved or maintained when transmission is interrupted for 12 consecutive months). Theresa Tam, the country’s chief public health office, ends her term on Friday.

The new head of public health, who is yet to be named, has a challenge ahead: How does public health alter its messaging when vaccine rates are falling? We’ll get an answer as we track Canada’s measles case count over summer vacation season.

Canadian physician Panid Borhanjoo was visiting his home country of Iran. But after he heard missiles fly overhead and watched smoke billow across the street, he quickly realized he could not depend on his own government for help. For the more than 4,000 Canadians in Iran registered with Global Affairs, there are few options for seeking safety.