Ontario has been dealing with its own measles outbreak, and genotyping of the virus circulating there indicates that it's one that hasn't been identified before in Canada, the CBC reports.
The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg says that the strains recovered in Ontario all belong to the D4 genotype, which is similar to, though not the same as, the one going around in Europe.
"If you have an exact match to a genotype in another country, the epidemiological information reveals the person travelled to that country, that's when the puzzle starts to come together," Matthew Gilmour, the lab's scientific director, tells the CBC.
The results also conclude that this outbreak is unrelated to the one stemming from Disneyland in California, though the cases in Quebec have been traced there, and similarity among the Ontario samples excludes the possibility of multiple introductions into the area, the CBC adds.
"What it does is it makes you ask more questions. You've got a strain that isn't related to anything else, so this is entirely a mystery as to where it came from," he says. "I think that's the really perplexing part of this."
Gilmore hypothesizes that the strain might have originated abroad in a place that's unable to do genotyping analysis.