Quelling the spread of measles involves immunization campaigns and public health protocols, but Tina Meggison says it also requires sitting down and having an open and honest conversation.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what she\u2019s working to do within the Low German-speaking Mennonite community in\u00a0Alberta.<\/p>\n
Meggison has more than a decade of professional \u2014 and a lifetime of personal \u2014 experience under her belt.<\/p>\n
Her team of community health representatives with Primary Care\u00a0Alberta\u00a0has seen a 25 per cent increase in demand for their services, which include accompanying patients to doctors\u2019 appointments and interpreting and answering questions in Low German, since the onset of an outbreak in March.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s about 350 calls per month on average, compared to 285 before the contagious disease spread to 1,656 people in the province.<\/p>\n
Meggison said the rise of people reaching out to the provincial health agency shows an interest in engaging with the health-care system, which historically has not always been the case.<\/p>\n
The next step is taking that outstretched hand and placing knowledge into it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can invite our families to start thinking from a different lens, or see things through a different lens, and maybe start to answer those questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Measles in Alberta<\/p>\n
Health-care hesitancy is rooted in fear for many Low German-speaking Mennonites. Meggison would know.<\/p>\n
She remembers a public health nurse rolling into her Mexican hometown of Durango on horse-and-buggy with a cooler of vaccines. The nurse told Meggison\u2019s mother to line up her 12 children in the yard, asked for their ages, and immunized them, without explanation.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe didn\u2019t know what had been given to her kids. She didn\u2019t have the language skills to ask the questions,\u201d Meggison said about her mother, whose primary language was Low German.<\/p>\n
Her family moved from Durango to Ontario when she was four years old, returned to Mexico more than a decade later, and then to\u00a0Alberta\u00a0in 2001. She started accompanying her mother to medical appointments and interpreting for her at 16 years old.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnbeknownst to me at that time, I was training for this work,\u201d Meggison said, speaking from Lethbridge, near the Canadian Rocky Mountains.<\/p>\n
When she started this line of work in an official capacity, she estimates the Low German Mennonite population in\u00a0Alberta\u00a0was 15,000. That\u2019s since grown to approximately 25,000 to 30,000, based on her organization\u2019s last tally. But she says given the transient nature of the population, it\u2019s likely an underestimate.<\/p>\n
Many came from Mexico to work the land in Canada. They migrated to Ontario and Manitoba, and from there, some made their way to\u00a0Alberta. The government had offered religious and educational autonomy in exchange for agricultural labour in the 1870s. But that freedom never materialized, leading some to mistrust and question the government\u2019s authority, said Margarita Penner, a newcomer and Low German Mennonite family liaison with Barons-Eureka-Warner Family and Community Support Services based in Taber.<\/p>\n
Penner said Mennonites settled all over\u00a0Alberta\u00a0\u2013 from La Crete in the north to 40 Mile County in the south, on the border of Montana.<\/p>\n
Community health representatives dedicated to the Low German-speaking Mennonite community are currently only based in southern\u00a0Alberta, with two full-timers based in Taber, Meggison in Lethbridge, and a roster of casuals. The demand has been so high that they boosted their availability from five to seven days a week.<\/p>\n
And now, Primary Care\u00a0Alberta\u00a0is hiring two more in the south, a third in the central health zone, and a fourth in the north.<\/p>\n
Southern\u00a0Alberta\u00a0has 945 measles cases, while the north zone has 534, and the central zone has 108.<\/p>\n
There, 68 per cent of kids had one dose and 56 per cent had two doses of the measles vaccine by age two in 2024, according to the province\u2019s figures for southern\u00a0Alberta.<\/p>\n
Local breakdowns for the age group show 40 per cent two-dose measles vaccine coverage in Lethbridge, 29 per cent in Taber, and 71 per cent in Medicine Hat.<\/p>\n
Dr. Joan Robinson, a pediatric infectious diseases physician in Edmonton, said the rest of the province is not much better off.\u00a0Alberta\u00a0has an average immunization rate of 80 per cent with one dose and 68 per cent with two doses for two-year-olds.<\/p>\n
Robinson says Alberta\u2019s low vaccination rates are due to a myriad of factors, including a broader mistrust in the health-care system and a public shift towards misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. She says people began getting information on immunizations on social media, rather than from medical experts, and began believing that vaccines are harmful.<\/p>\n
She also says it would be helpful if the\u00a0Alberta\u00a0government debunked this belief.<\/p>\n
Though Edmonton and Calgary have lower case counts than the rest of the province, she points to particular areas within the urban cities that are not much better.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe highest immunization rate in the whole province is barely over 80 per cent in Provost. It means that every community that measles is introduced into, there\u2019s a reasonable chance of more cases,\u201d Robinson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn order to prevent measles, we really do need community immunization rates as high as 95 per cent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Run and hide<\/p>\n
Meggison said health education starts with identifying misinformation that heightens deeply entrenched fear.<\/p>\n
She holds focus groups for Low German communities that open the door to seemingly simple, yet controversy-riddled topics, such as: What is measles? What are its long-term consequences? What is in the vaccine that prevents it?<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t know what it is you\u2019re preventing \u2026 then what is the motivation to prevent it?\u201d<\/p>\n
This is all done in Low German because many members of the community don\u2019t speak or understand English fluently, and don\u2019t read or write, making it challenging to access credible information, Meggison said.<\/p>\n
She shows them places they can source accurate facts, such as a YouTube channel where she hosts videos in Low German on health topics, with some gaining more than 1,000 views.<\/p>\n
Proudly, she recalls seeing a lightbulb go off for one woman who described an epiphany in one of her recent groups.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe said, \u2018I can make decisions for my family, and it doesn\u2019t have to be public knowledge. I can make these decisions and not share it with my family members if they ask, and I can just say that\u2019s my business,’\u201d Meggison said. She described other women nodding in response to this passionate declaration, which strays far from their community\u2019s everybody-knows-everything way of life.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could see that there was a sense of freedom that came out of that group.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her hope is that conversation will spread within the tight-knit community.<\/p>\n
\u2018Needle is neutral\u2019<\/p>\n
Alberta\u2019s health-care system has translation services, but the challenge is Low German is not common outside of the community. It holds shared cultural significance, which makes interpretation hard to come by and word choice paramount.<\/p>\n
Nely Penner, a community health representative in Taber, said the word \u201cvaccine\u201d was an obvious roadblock to upping measles immunization in southern\u00a0Alberta.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I think of the word vaccine in German, I just think of the history of immunization in Mexico,\u201d Penner, who grew up in a Low German community in Mexico\u2019s northern Chihuahua region, said.<\/p>\n
Though Penner never personally experienced \u201cvaccine nurses\u201d like Meggison did, similar stories were passed down from her parents and grandparents.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople didn\u2019t understand what they were getting. It was fear-based. People would run and hide to not get these vaccines.\u201d<\/p>\n
To mitigate the negative connotation, she suggested\u00a0Alberta\u00a0health providers use the word needle instead.<\/p>\n
\u201cNeedle is just more neutral,\u201d Penner said.<\/p>\n
Little changes like this can have a big impact in facilitating a health space that feels safer, acknowledges and validates feelings of mistrust, Penner said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019re getting information, especially sensitive information, you want to be able to trust that person. And so that\u2019s such a huge part of what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Quelling the spread of measles involves immunization campaigns and public health protocols, but Tina Meggison says it also…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48707,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":["post-48706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}