Resurgence of Whooping Cough Occurs Despite Vaccination

Prathamesh

1 month ago

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An unexpected illness

“Isn’t that some disease from a long time ago?”

That was my husband’s reaction when I told him that my doctor thought I had whooping cough. Indeed, I myself hadn’t come across the words “whooping cough” since I was forced to read ‘Great Expectations’ in school.

Yet here it was, the answer — if not the solution — to why the cold I’ve had for weeks wasn’t going away, and kept sprouting new characteristics. First it was a painful sore throat, then the lymph nodes on my neck blew up into goitre-like protrusions. The latest twist was coughing fits, “paroxysms” in Dickensian-era terms, that were so prolonged and violent I threw up every meal.

The coughing fits were the key to the diagnosis, and where the disease gets its name: The “whoop” of desperate inhalation in between paroxysms that can go on for months, in such force that people have been known to break their ribs.

It had all started when we visited Shanghai on vacation in mid-March. My baby Margot came down with an upper respiratory infection the day we returned to Hong Kong, and her fever lasted for over a week. I got sick shortly after.

Luckily, she was old enough to have already had the full vaccination for pertussis, as whooping cough is also known, and never got as sick as the newborns in heartbreaking videos on the Internet, who cough for so long that you wonder if they’ll ever draw a breath again.

Some don’t: there’s been 13 deaths in the resurgent whooping cough wave in China which our team wrote about this week. Fatalities from this disease, I know from my research, are almost always infants who are too young to be vaccinated, or toddlers who haven’t had access to the shots.

China recorded over 32,000 cases of pertussis in just the first two months of 2024 — a 20-fold increase from a year ago. The Philippines, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and many other places have also reported a surge in cases.

In the grand scheme of things, I know we’re fortunate to have been vaccinated. If this had happened just a few months ago, Margot would have been too young to be fully protected.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com