Montreal public health officials are calling for better access to tuberculosis care after a sharp rise in the number of cases reported last year.
The regional health authority reported 203 cases in 2024, compared to an average of 123 cases per year over the previous decade, representing a 53 percent increase.
“This significant increase in the last year breaks with the stability observed over the previous years, which followed a downward trend observed over several decades until the early 2000s,” says an annual report published online last week.
While tuberculosis levels are low in Canada overall, the report authors said the illness disproportionately affects certain groups, including indigenous people and those born in countries where the disease is endemic.
About 89 percent of Montreal’s cases since 2015 involved people born outside Canada, and most contracted the disease outside the country. Some 48 percent of last year’s cases were among people who were not covered by the province’s health insurance plan, up from nine percent in 2015.
While some of those patients may have private insurance, or temporary health benefits under the interim federal health program, the authors say many still face “significant barriers” to care, urging the province to develop new programs to reach them.
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“The growing proportion of people without (provincial health insurance) coverage is an invitation to consider the creation of strategies and programs, as other Canadian provinces have done, to reduce access barriers for the management and treatment of tuberculosis among people without adequate insurance, to facilitate the work of clinical and public health teams and, in so doing, protect the entire population,” the report says.
The report also found that cases of syphilis have risen about 60 percent over the last 10 years in Montreal, from 348 cases in 2014 to 556 in 2024. While the vast majority of cases involved men, the number of women being diagnosed is growing, “suggesting an extension of the epidemic towards the heterosexual population,” the report reads.
Cases of syphilis have been rising all over the world in recent years, after the disease almost disappeared in the early 2000s.
The report also notes that Montreal experienced outbreaks of a number of other infectious diseases in 2024, including a measles outbreak between February and June, a “cyclical” rise in whooping cough and a spate of mpox cases between August and December.
