Alberta Knew Measles Was Harming Pregnant Patients—But Stayed Silent

Recently, I reported for The Walrus on how Alberta lost the plot on measles in 2025.

First, a reminder of the timeline. Canada’s recent trouble with measles began late in October 2024, when an infected traveller brought it to New Brunswick. By November 1, public health officials declared an outbreak in the Fredericton area, and soon, more than forty people—mostly unvaccinated children—contracted the virus.

By March 2025, measles had made it to northern Alberta, and by the summer, the province reported more measles cases than the entire United States. (The population of Alberta is 5 million; the US is almost seventy times greater, at 342 million.) In October, we learned a baby in the province had died from congenital measles, though details were scant.

Then, in November 2025, our international shame. The Pan American Health Organization revoked Canada’s measles elimination status, following more than a year of sustained transmission of the same strain. We’d eliminated the virus in 1998 and held onto the status for twenty-seven years owing to a safe and effective vaccine, but as vaccine hesitancy grew and vaccination rates dropped, susceptibility to this once-vanquished disease skyrocketed. Fire, meet fuel. Elimination status has now been removed for the entire region of the Americas, from Patagonia to the Canadian Arctic.

I’m a little angry about this, if you couldn’t tell.

My vantage on the whole thing was near field. I’m a family doctor in Alberta who delivers babies, and for months, it seemed measles came up in most patient visits. Pregnant people wanted to know whether they could get sick. They might. Risks included pregnancy losses, sick newborns, and stillbirths. Measles had been eliminated before I went to medical school, so I had no direct experience of it, but these were all outcomes I knew from my training.

Then came the questions. Would it be okay for family and friends to visit the newborn? Was it okay to travel? Would visitors be restricted at the hospital, like during COVID-19 times, when visitor restrictions foreshadowed the implosion of the health care system? (Yes, became the answer to that last question in July, when signs went up announcing no more than two support people in certain high-risk areas of the hospital: oncology, intensive care, and labour and delivery.)

But during much of mid- and latter-2025, something nagged at me. If so many people were being infected with measles, where was the data on obstetrical outcomes? Alberta updated its quadruple digits daily—doubtless some of those cases involved pregnant people. When the CBC reported in June that twenty pregnant Albertans had been infected, that was based on a query from an enterprising reporter; nothing comparable was being disclosed internally with physicians. How could I help patients make informed decisions without the information that mattered most?

On September 18, 2025, nearly finished my reporting for The Walrus, I decided to submit an Access to Information Request to the province, flagging myself as a reporter. Things I wanted to know included: How many confirmed cases of measles in pregnant women had been reported in Alberta since March 1, 2025? Of those with antenatal measles, how many had been hospitalized? How many had preterm labour? How many infants had been diagnosed with congenital measles? And, most crucially, how many stillbirths or neonatal deaths occurred within the first twenty-eight days?

Perhaps because I’d provided too many specifics in my query, the day after, an information officer suggested I amend it to specifically request copies of all communication between Alberta Health Services, Primary Care Alberta, and the Ministry of Health regarding maternal and perinatal outcomes related to measles, from March to the end of August.

I agreed, and two months later, I received a file and was charged $25.

That I was being charged so little did not bode well. I downloaded the file. My heart quickened a little as I clicked on the folder. Waiting inside were a meagre twenty-six pages of emails, much of the relevant information redacted.

Like this passage, from a June email from an Alberta government epidemiologist to a person with Provincial Notifiable Diseases, copied to other government officials:

I wanted to flag [redacted] reported cases related to pregnancy that I was hoping someone there could take a look at; [redacted] case is pregnancy in someone currently reported as suspect who I think is a confirmed case, and [redacted] are people who recently gave birth and I think meet the definition for having pregnancy flagged as Yes in their NDR [notifiable disease report].

Or this, also in June:

As an FYI here are some other instances where a pregnant person got sick right after they delivered or a baby was sick a few weeks after they were born. [Redacted].

Redacted, redacted, redacted. No big surprise, given what the Globe and Mail’s Alanna Smith received in her ATI covering the period of March through May 2025. “The documents,” she writes in a piece published in August, “show it was common for AHS to have to wait for government approval to proceed, in some cases frustrating its efforts to more quickly implement, for example, visitor restrictions in hospitals.”

Like Smith, I had no interest in making public any details on individual patients. I didn’t even really care who the individual decision makers in the emails were, and therefore, I’m not sharing names. I merely wanted numbers. And I wanted to know why, and for how long, Albertans weren’t hearing about them.

Of course, there were numbers. But in spite of the ATI request and the months of waiting, I’m no further ahead in being able to tell you. What I can tell you is that, in the summer, a (redacted) spreadsheet named “2025_measles_pregnancy_birth_ outcomes” circulated. And that there were likely some sad stories in it, given this passage from an email on July 24: “Unfortunately there appear to have been some additional miscarriages since my last check.”

This was followed by an email confirming “43 pregnant cases [redacted qualifier], [redacted] probable pregnant cases, includes [redacted] intrauterine fetal demise, [redacted] suspected pregnant cases, includes [redacted] infant born without measles.”

Then, buried amongst emails debating the definition of congenital measles, the saddest one of all, from September 17, with the opening line: “Here is the death certificate as we discussed earlier.” Which must have been for the baby whose death was announced in October, two weeks after the request for the certificate was circulated. Today, to check my timeline was correct, I went looking for the news release from the province that must have announced the baby’s death. I could find nothing. (Smith’s most recent piece reports on this delay in announcement.)

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What all this amounts to, for me, is a province that understood the stakes of the measles outbreak and of the impact of preventable illness on a beleaguered health care system, yet failed to share what it knew, in real time, about the harm being done to its most vulnerable citizens. Despite internal emails indicating miscarriages, stillbirths, and at least one infant death, the province released no clear, timely data to clinicians or the public. Heavily redacted records confirmed officials were actually tracking these harms while debating whether—and how—to report them.

How do I know this? Because of this email, also dated September 17, to the regional medical officer of health, copied to several provincial officials:

I wanted to F/U with you specifically because I believe you were waiting on a decision from OCMOH [office of the chief medical officer of health] about how to report some of these situations in your zone. [redacted] . . . There will be some additional work happening regarding the need for public reporting for this one as it did result in infant death. The other ones that have been reported to us are being classified as complications of pregnancy informally. There are conversations ongoing about how to more formally capture those adverse outcomes of pregnancy.

I hope the bad measles outcomes in Alberta, such as the one reported death of an infant, have been few. We don’t know—and the province has effectively ensured that we don’t.

I also hope the province will one day recognize the irony. On November 24, two weeks after the loss of measles elimination status, the province introduced Bill 11 which, among other things, would allow for more doctors to offer their services in private settings, in the name of patient autonomy. It’s widely known as the legislation paving the way for a two-tiered system.

The bill received royal assent in a blistering twenty-four days. Autonomy was invoked to fast track the reimagining of an entire health care system but denied when patients and clinicians needed information most.

The post Alberta Knew Measles Was Harming Pregnant Patients—But Stayed Silent first appeared on The Walrus.