Montreal City Weblog

Kate 10:36 on 2025-03-06 Permalink Reply  

• Ephraim 11:46 on 2025-03-06 Permalink

  And the only real treatment… vaccination, but usually within 72 hours of exposure. If a case was found at that show, even if vaccinated, you still have a 3% chance of getting measles. If you are unvaccinated, it’s over 90%.

• maggie rose 14:29 on 2025-03-06 Permalink

  Ephraim, dontcha know there’s always vitamin D and cod liver oil! /large helping of sarcasm

• Ephraim 15:41 on 2025-03-06 Permalink

  Hey, for those against vaccination, they may be in luck, Measles often causes “Immunity Amnesia” so your whole system gets reset and it’s as if you never been vaccinated (or had any diseases)… just like a newborn!

• Ian 16:02 on 2025-03-06 Permalink

  @maggie rose – I thought Captain Brainworms was pitching Vitamin A, I was waiting to see the reports of Vitamin A overdoses rolling in…
  Fun times.

• jeather 16:38 on 2025-03-06 Permalink

  Fun fact that I looked up today: about 30 regular vitamin A pills (from a bottle I saw on Amazon, which contains 100 pills for about $10) will give you acute poisoning, about 3 a day for 6ish months will give you chronic. (These are for adults.) If you stop taking it once you get ill, generally regular supportive care will cure the symptoms (assuming you see an actual doctor), but it causes irreversible birth defects in a fetus. That said it does seem true that, if you have measles, vitamin A can help (but not via DIY).

  It takes 2-3 years on average after measles to be back to full immunity, post immune amnesia. Another fun fact is is that, like chicken pox, measles can settle in the brain and pop up as an (almost invariably fatal) encephalitis usually about 10 years later but possibly as much as 30 years later.

• Chris 20:11 on 2025-03-06 Permalink

  I had to laugh a little when I saw the Rialto show was called FEVERUP. 🙂

• EmilyG 22:49 on 2025-03-06 Permalink

  I haven’t been to any events at the Rialto this year. Though, the second-to-last time I was there, I did get Covid. (Not that this reflects on the theatre itself.)
  I should see if my vaccinations are up to date for measles.

• maggie rose 04:24 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  Ah, yes @Ian, vitamin A is what I meant. We live in such interesting times my brain is a bit befuddled with information re: inane and psychotic political leaders. It’s funny, I take a few natural supplements, but A is one I always steered away from. One recent success for me was magnesium for a 15 out of 10 on the pain scale attack of plantar fasciitis. In less than a month I can again stand and walk without feeling like a sharp stone is implanted in my heel. According to Mayo clinic, feet are affected by Covid. Long variety in my case, though a direct link is elusive. Sorry for side-stepping measles discussion.

• PatrickC 10:38 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  I grew up before there were vaccines for them, so I had measles, “German” measles, and chicken pox, all before I was 10 or 11 (I missed the mumps, but my brother got them). They were certainly no fun, but is it only because I was a 1950s child (or lucky) that I don’t remember those diseases being as serious as they are now? To be clear, I am totally in favor of requiring all kids be vaccinated and think the idea “religious” exemptions bogus.

• jeather 11:06 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  Rubella/german measles is mostly only serious if you are pregnant (see the Agatha Christie book about this), mumps is mostly not serious but occasionally results in temporary or permanent deafness, chicken pox is mostly not serious until it comes back as shingles, and the immune amnesia effect of measles was only discovered around 2010, but studies show a correlation, post vaccine, of a decrease in measles death rate and non-measles death rate in children. (This is the first article I found, but I’ve seen it before.)

  But measles resulted in millions of deaths per year before the vaccine (directly, not the related deaths for the next year as you rebuilt immunity), it wasn’t ever not serious. Maybe it was because polio seemed worse?

• MarcG 11:26 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  Perhaps in the pre-vaccine era it was normal for a certain number of children to die so not newsworthy, and also most deaths occured at ages before our memories developed and school started so it’s not like you would have recollections of your friends and classmates disappearing.

• Kate 11:35 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  I had measles around age 4 or 5, and have only the haziest memory of it. Later, my parents said it was the sickest I ever was, as a kid. Neither parent caught it then, but odds are they’d already had it. As PatrickC says, measles wasn’t considered a panic then, to be reported and traced as it is now.

• MarcG 11:49 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  Life expectancy at birth for males born in Canada in 1950 was 66 years and in 2009 it was 79. “Lower life expectancy at birth during the early 20th century was, in part, a reflection of high levels of infant mortality. About 1 in 10 Canadian babies died within the first year of life in 1921, compared with about 1 in 200 in 2011.” statcan

• PatrickC 12:33 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  @jeather, thanks for these details. What I remember about mumps is that it was really bad to get it after puberty, and so my brother was lucky he was still a young kid. As for chicken pox, I have had shingles twice in later life, the second time despite having had a shot to prevent it. And yes, polio was probably seen as a so much greater thought. I can remember how my siblings and I lined up to get that vaccine as soon as it was available. IIRC, it was at a temporary clinic set up for the purpose at Notre-Dame de Grâce school (or was it Le Manoir? in that neighborhood, anyway). We were there in droves, though I also remember that in those days we used to tell bad jokes about iron lungs…

• EmilyG 13:56 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  I’m old/young enough that I got a vaccine for measles, but I got chicken pox before there was a vaccine for it. Should probably get the shingles vaccine.

• Kate 14:04 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  MarcG, my grandmother had five kids in Point St Charles, between 1911 and 1921, of whom only three grew up. Kids just died of things we’d cure with a quick course of antibiotics now.

  My mother used to talk more about tuberculosis than polio. She worked in the huge Northern Electric plant – now Le Nordelec – where from time to time mobile x‑ray machines were brought in, everyone was screened, and a few people were always taken off work and sent to a sanatorium in Ste‑Agathe where they had to stay for months. (Who paid for this? I have no idea. This was before socialized medicine.)

  PatrickC, was that the oral polio vaccine? I remember being given that in grade school.

• EmilyG 14:54 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  My friend got tuberculosis as a university student in Montreal a little while ago. It surprised a lot of us. We didn’t know it was still around.

• jeather 15:10 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  FYI if you were born in the 70s in Quebec you only got ONE shot of the measles vaccine and should get a second dose. They claim one is enough, but it is not. (You can get one, but every now and then you get a nurse who argues.)

• Kate 15:13 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  EmilyG, I know, it seems like something from a Victorian novel now.

  A friend’s dad had polio as a kid, and while not visibly limping, he’s apparently always had weakened legs as a result. He’s the only person I’ve knowingly met that had it.

• PatrickC 15:56 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  @Kate, As I recall it was a shot with a long needle.

• MarcG 16:52 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  @jeather: Funny timing, I was at the clinic a few hours ago to get a vaccination record reviewed and they said one measles shot was enough, and when I pushed on the issue they said that they couldn’t under any circumstances give a second dose if it’s not indicated in their rulebook.

• jeather 17:09 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  Here is the case (scroll down) if you are entitled to a second measles shot and were born in the 70s:

  People born between 1970 and 1979 who are trainees in the healthcare sector, health care workers, military recruits or who planning to travel outside Canada

  I’ve been told that using the “planning to travel somewhere where there is measles” works.

• MarcG 17:34 on 2025-03-07 Permalink

  Good trick, thank you. I wonder if the real sticklers would ask for proof of travel. This is the webpage they were using as a reference.