The video features two children, one with a T-shirt that says “vaccinated” and another with a shirt that says “not vaccinated.”
Men in green morph suits show up with buckets of green slime, and are able to drop it on the child that is not vaccinated.
But the vaccinated child uses an umbrella to protect him from the slime, which represents vaccine-preventable diseases.
Schell said that 87 per cent of 17-year-olds in Greater Sudbury and the surrounding district have all of their mandated vaccines.
She said while the health unit's goal is to reach 100 per cent immunity, the high vaccination rate has meant Sudbury no longer sees cases of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.
But she added diseases that have been wiped out in the region could return if fewer children are vaccinated.
“If people choose not to vaccinate their kids, there is certainly the risk that those diseases would come back and start to infect our children again,” Schell said.
In the 2012-2013 school year, provincewide vaccination rates for 17-year-olds ranged from 84 per cent for diphtheria to 97.1 per cent for rubella, according to Public Health Ontario.
Of the six diseases designated under the Immunization of School Pupils Act that year, which in addition to diphtheria and rubella, also included tetanus, polio, measles and mumps, only rubella met the recommended target vaccination coverage.
On July 1, 2014, three diseases — meningococcal disease, pertussis (whooping cough) and chickenpox, for children born after 2010 — were added to the list of designated vaccines.
Parents who do not want their children immunized for those diseases need to fill out a special exemptions form.
If a school has an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease, children without the proper vaccines will be excluded from school during the outbreak period.
According to Public Health Ontario, religion was the No. 1 reason parents chose not to have their children vaccinated, followed by medical reasons.
