1866 – Introduced after a highly-publicized “false alarm” over cholera’s possible return to Canada from Europe, the Public Health Act is introduced one year before Canadian Confederation. This legislation includes the creation of a Central Board of Health.
1887 – Ontario’s first Vaccination Act is passed shortly after 6,000 unvaccinated Montreal residents die of smallpox. This law mandates that all babies be vaccinated, allows municipalities to introduce compulsory vaccination for adults during an epidemic, and gives school boards the authority to proscribe vaccination for all students. Other provinces soon pass similar legislation.
1906 – The 1906 revisions to the federal Immigration Act bar tubercular immigrants and standardize new health screening requirements at Canadian ports.
1919 – When 50,000 Canadians die of Spanish Influenza immediately following the First World War, the Federal Board of Health is created to manage domestic health crises and monitor population health.
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Isabel Wallace: Past epidemics have prepared Canada for Ebola
1962 – Waves of polio infection in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s led to widespread vaccination using the “Sabin” vaccine, which replaces the “Salk” inoculation introduced in 1955. Many municipalities, including Ottawa, have already begun to chlorinate public swimming pools after scientific study proves that chlorine kills the poliovirus.
2003 – SARS arrives in Toronto in March. By the end of the second wave of the epidemic in July, 43 people have died of 251 infected with the virus. Working with Toronto-area hospitals, Ontario’s government introduces unprecedented infection-control protocols, including halting all non-essential hospital operations, to stop the epidemic.
Aug. 2 2014 – Dr. Kent Brantly, a physician with the Christian aid organization Samaritans Purse who contracted Ebola in Liberia, arrives in Atlanta, Georgia under quarantine. Brantly is joined in Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital by his colleague and fellow Ebola patient, nurse Nancy Writebol, on Aug. 5.
Isabel Wallace is a sessional lecturer in history at Trent University.