Measles Season: Yet Again, a Vancouver Outbreak is Traced to Beijing

It's been 11 months since our last measles blog, so we'll take that as a small victory. But a warning about a possible Beijing-linked measles harks back to earlier, similar exposures to the disease over the last two years.

A passenger aboard Air China flight 991 from Beijing to Vancouver on March 3 had measles and may have exposed others, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported Friday. 

"Because flights from Beijing to Vancouver are long, and because measles is the most infectious disease known to us, when we can, we take the opportunity to tell the public they've been exposed," Dr. Reka Gustafson, a medical health officer with Vancouver Coastal Health told CBC.

An infected passenger traveled aboard an Air Canada flight on July 31, 2014, and a March, 2015 outbreak traced to Chaoyangmen also saw an infected passenger fly on the same route to Vancouver, and potentially infect other flyers.

Your correspondent caught measles in Beijing in 1997, despite being vaccinated. Patients are infectious four days before they show signs, and four days after those symptoms are visible. Read more about measles here.

More stories by this author here.

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