An average of one baby a week in Manitoba’s Southern Health region is being given a preventive treatment after a potential measles exposure, which a health official says is a sign of the disease’s widespread transmission and the vulnerability of babies too young to be vaccinated.

Dr. Davinder Singh, a medical officer of health with Southern Health, said babies ineligible for vaccination are being provided with immune globulin. The injection into a muscle or through a vein is only done if it’s within six days of an exposure to the highly contagious disease.

“At least every week, we get informed about a family where this type of situation has occurred,” said Singh, who represents the health region with most of Manitoba’s measles cases.

In most cases, a contact tracer informs the family the treatment, referred to as post-exposure prophylaxis, is recommended.

The parents bringing their child for treatment are worried, Singh said, because unvaccinated babies have a high risk of severe outcomes, including hospitalization and pneumonia.

Exposure sometimes hard to avoid

“For some of them, there may have been nothing that they could have done differently to have prevented the exposure,” he said.

“Everyone in the family might have been immunized, but you can’t give a measles vaccine to an infant under the age of six months.”

Singh recalled an “unusual week” earlier this year where Southern Health reported four babies receiving the preventive treatment.

He’s also aware of post-exposure prophylaxis being provided elsewhere in Manitoba. The province said it couldn’t say how many people have received this type of treatment.

Immune globulin is a fast-acting option because the injection contains antibodies taken from human blood that immediately works to neutralize the virus. It greatly reduces the chance of infection.

The province limits the vaccine to babies who are at least one year old, but it has expanded eligibility in some regions. Babies who are at least six months old in areas with significant measles spread — the Southern Health, Interlake-Eastern and Prairie Mountain health regions — are eligible.

Babies who are regularly taken to those areas, or have close contacts there, are also eligible.

The provincial government says 30 babies under the age of one have contracted measles since the outbreak started more than a year ago.

Manitoba has reported 170 confirmed and 28 probable cases of measles across all age groups in February, more than half the measles cases the province counted in 2025.

The province is the measles hot spot in Canada, according to federal government data.

In 2023, two-thirds of seven-year-olds in Manitoba were immunized against measles. In Southern Health, it was closer to half.

“None of this would be happening if we had maintained the same high levels of immunization that previously existed in Manitoba,” Singh said.

Given the vulnerability of babies and other immunocompromised people, Shared Health —which co–ordinates health-care delivery in the province — says all health regions are screening for measles symptoms upon entry to emergency departments.

Facilities are adhering to infection prevention and control measures to reduce the risk of transmission, though “specific processes may vary slightly by site,” Shared Health said in a statement.

Visitor restrictions at NICU

At Women’s Hospital in Winnipeg, visitors to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), which provides care for premature or sick newborns, are facing restrictions.

Only two visitors per patient, one of which must be the designated caregiver, are permitted at a time.

Those visitors must be free of illness and have their immunizations up to date. Children under the age of five cannot enter.

Health Sciences Centre is also actively screening visitors for measles-related symptoms at some areas of the hospital. In some higher-risk units, that screening could happen on a daily basis.

Dr. Philippe Lagacé-Wiens, a medical microbiologist and physician at St. Boniface Hospital, considers these precautions “absolutely essential.”

That hospital is doing targeted screening for all in-patient wards within the obstetrics, gynecology and neonatology program, as well as the NICU, Shared Health said.

Lagacé-Wiens said it’s been a learning curve to help staff members ask the right questions and recognize measles symptoms, which can start with a flu and runny nose but progress to tell-tale red rashes.

“Most of our staff, until recently, had never seen a case of measles and didn’t necessarily know the symptoms,” he said.

Developing that criteria is “critically important,” Lagacé-Wiens said, “especially in first contact points, like triage for emergency and triage for obstetrics.”

However, he added visitor screening isn’t as robust as in the COVID-19 days, when every visitor encountered a checkpoint.

No blanket visitor bans are being proposed because measles vaccines are effective, Lagacé-Wiens said.

“Even though measles is a severe disease and it spreads very, very fast and rapidly, we have means of preventing it. And still, to this point, most people are protected against it.”

He said vaccinations are the answer, even though recent provincial stats show nearly six per cent of people catching measles received two vaccine doses.

Lagacé-Wiens said no vaccine is 100 per cent effective, and the people still contracting measles might have weakened immune systems that dampen the vaccine’s effectiveness.

“We’ve known this for a long time, that not everybody will respond, and that there are conditions that make you unable to fight off the infection despite vaccination,” he said.

That’s why we need a “high level of overall vaccination to prevent that chain of transmission from … the virus randomly finding somebody out there that’s susceptible.”