6 ms·

Deadly Whooping Cough, Once Wiped Out, Is Back

29 points by cwan 16y ago

abstractbill 16y ago
You can help kill Whooping Cough again. Get a DTAP booster. Your GP can give it to you, or if you happen to be in San Francisco there's a clinic at 101 Grove Street that will give you the shot for just $10.
- sabat 16y ago
  Thx for that tip -- I may just bike over there.
- jurjenh 16y ago
  How did it die in the first place? Is there conclusive evidence that it was the vaccination and not just due to a cumulative effect of better hygiene, better diet and better living conditions? And when and how did it resurrect itself? These questions need to be answered, because if there was an incorrect assumption in any of the previous answers, the current solution may not be as good as we'd hope...
  - jon_hendry 16y ago
    "And when and how did it resurrect itself?" Immigration and tourism from countries with less vaccination. Combined with reduced vaccination in the US.
- abdelazer 16y ago
  That's right ($35 for most folks, $10 for people with very young kids), they're doing walk-ins for the pertussis booster right now (http://sfcdcp.org/pertussisiz.html http://sfcdcp.org/pertussisiz.html). Everyone under 1 or with a kid under 1 (including pregnant women) should get the shot ASAP. http://sfcdcp.org/AITCcontact.html http://sfcdcp.org/AITCcontact.html: Mon, Wed, Thurs, Fri 9:00 am - 4:00 pm Tues 9:00 am - 3:00 pm
tmcw 16y ago
Sigh. Whooping cough back because everyone's afraid of the non-threat of vaccines. Bed bugs back because everyone's afraid of DDT. Uninformed wusses are killing us all.
- tptacek 16y ago
  I avidly read this as another antivax story, but it doesn't seem to be one; rather, the issue here is that adults need to get DTAP boosters. Who knew? Not me.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Apparently that's new: in the US at least, Tdap was only approved in 2005, and replaced Td (the previous standard bundled tetanus/diptheria every-10-years booster) in most recommendations/clinics around 2006-2007. So adults who haven't had a tetanus booster in the past 3-4 years didn't get the one that includes whooping cough, and probably don't even know about the change (I got my last booster in 2003, and didn't know that it was different now).
    - mechanical_fish 16y ago
      ... And now I understand why my doctor gave me a tetanus booster last month without even asking if I had had one in the last ten years. (I think I have, but I'm not sure, and I never turn down free tetanus boosters if the doctor offers one.)
  - abstractbill 16y ago
    It's both. There's a cluster of "crazy hippy" people in and around Marin who are convinced vaccinations are responsible for every modern ailment. I've met, and tried unsuccessfully to reason with a few of them. The DTAP booster may be our best shot (haha) at routing around them though. Even if they won't vaccinate their children, if enough adults get regular DTAPs we might be able to get enough herd immunity that whooping cough dies out again.
- sabat 16y ago
kmfrk 16y ago
I just want to highlight this part of the article for people who are about to close their window without reading it: >The California epidemic has raised plenty of questions about the role of vaccination and the increasing numbers of parents who decide not to vaccinate their children. California’s Department of Public Health cites three schools in the state where 80 percent of parents have signed a “personal belief exemption” to keep their children from being vaccinated. That just blows my mind.
- codyrobbins 16y ago
  I seriously can’t understand how these vaccinations aren’t mandated by law without exception. The point of vaccination is to protect public health from devastating communicable diseases, just like the point of fire codes are to protect the community from fires that could easily spread from building to building and destroy an entire city. It’s like being able to sign a ‘personal belief exemption’ saying you don’t believe in fire codes in order to exempt your house from them. I’m largely a libertarian, but I certainly don’t want my neighboring houses to all be firetraps.
  - rue 16y ago
    > It’s like being able to sign a ‘personal belief exemption’ saying you don’t believe in fire codes in order to exempt your house from them. More like exempting your office building from them.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    The "personal belief exemption" should involve being quarantined with the other idiots who refuse vaccinations. At 80%, some neighborhoods seem to already be volunteering for that role.
  - Oxryly 16y ago
    I don't thing the metaphor holds up. If you vaccinate your child, why do you care if other children are vaccinated or not? Your kid is immune...
    - 16y ago
c1sc0 16y ago
Everyone should be vaccinated against stupidity, a.k.a. that thing called education.
jacquesm 16y ago
If you think that is scary, this is what I think is scary: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/world/asia/12bug.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/world/asia/12bug.html More and more bacteria are finding the route to antibiotic resistance, MRSA is already quite a problem in some areas causing patients transferred from one hospital to another to be quarantined on the off chance they might be carrier. The whooping cough is a serious risk to infants but mortality for adults is quite low.
- philwelch 16y ago
  I've actually had MRSA. For many cases they just use different antibiotics for it, combined with physically cleaning the infection site. Mine was small, but my mom had a much larger infection which simply took more time and effort to apply similar techniques. (Fun fact: walking into a student health clinic with a MRSA sore on your arm, walking to the nurse's desk, holding up your arm and asking "what's this?" will get you seen very promptly!) Turns out the primary treatment for antibiotic-resistent bacteria is to use older antibiotics. Bacteria only become resistant to antibiotics that have recently been used--antibiotics that have fallen out of use, there's no evolutionary pressure for bacteria to remain resistant to, so within a number of generations of not encountering that antibiotic, bacteria are suddenly vulnerable to it. The medium term solution is to have between 4 and 6 generations of antibiotics, so hopefully we can just cycle around them as the bacteria catch up. Antibiotic resistance is nothing new, it's just another problem to be solved. NDM-1 may or may not be a major curveball. Personally, until I know for sure, I'll leave the worrying up to the people whose job it is to worry about such things and try to avoid going to India for any elective surgeries anytime soon.
joezydeco 16y ago
Can we rename it "Jenny McCarthy Whooping Cough"?
dalenkruse 16y ago
I contracted whooping cough about 5 years ago at the age of 29. I had no idea what was wrong with me and it took 3 doctors to diagnose it correctly. I can't totally fault the doctor's diagnosis on the initial visit. When you have someone come into your office in late October in Minnesota complaining of coughing and respirator pain, it's probably something pretty common. I was on several different medications for 5 weeks. I would start to feel better while on the medication and then get worse when I finished the medication. At no time did the medication help completely, and my condition worsened at time went by. I had several chest x-rays and they all came back clean. The third doctor I visited finally took interest in my case and expanded the tests and came back with a diagnosis of whooping cough. After I found that out and did my own research (which include listening to sound clips), I knew it was the correct diagnosis. I had a 11-month old son at the time and my main concern was that he would contract it also. Thankfully, that never happened. It took me about 5 months before I was completely healed. I wouldn't wish that disease on my worst enemy. Every time you go into a coughing fit, you feel like you are going to die. I blacked out 3 times from coughing fits. They come up on you very fast and are very intense and uncontrollable. I also lost my voice for about 4 weeks. My advice is to get yourself (and your children if you have any) vaccinated...yesterday!
- ra 16y ago
  I upvoted you for the personal account. I live in Sydney, Australia and our area currently has a whooping cough outbreak. I'm only aware of this because we have a 3 month old son. When we were making out antinatal visits to the hospital there were whooping cough awareness signs everywhere. We both had tests, I had the antibody but my girlfriend didn't, so she had the vaccination. I had whooping cough when I was very young, so young I don't remember it at all. But thanks for highlighting your experience. Beyond the photocopied flyers on the walls in the hospital, I know nothing about whooping cough (and until just now I didn't even realize it was a serious illness) and I'm pretty sure the general public doesn't either.
julius_geezer 16y ago
Never heard of a booster for this. Will ask at my next physical.

29 points by cwan 16y ago

You can help kill Whooping Cough again. Get a DTAP booster. Your GP can give it to you, or if you happen to be in San Francisco there's a clinic at 101 Grove Street that will give you the shot for just $10.

sabat 16y ago
Thx for that tip -- I may just bike over there.
jurjenh 16y ago
How did it die in the first place? Is there conclusive evidence that it was the vaccination and not just due to a cumulative effect of better hygiene, better diet and better living conditions? And when and how did it resurrect itself? These questions need to be answered, because if there was an incorrect assumption in any of the previous answers, the current solution may not be as good as we'd hope...
- jon_hendry 16y ago
  "And when and how did it resurrect itself?" Immigration and tourism from countries with less vaccination. Combined with reduced vaccination in the US.
abdelazer 16y ago
That's right ($35 for most folks, $10 for people with very young kids), they're doing walk-ins for the pertussis booster right now (http://sfcdcp.org/pertussisiz.html http://sfcdcp.org/pertussisiz.html). Everyone under 1 or with a kid under 1 (including pregnant women) should get the shot ASAP. http://sfcdcp.org/AITCcontact.html http://sfcdcp.org/AITCcontact.html: Mon, Wed, Thurs, Fri 9:00 am - 4:00 pm Tues 9:00 am - 3:00 pm

tmcw 16y ago

Sigh. Whooping cough back because everyone's afraid of the non-threat of vaccines. Bed bugs back because everyone's afraid of DDT. Uninformed wusses are killing us all.

tptacek 16y ago
I avidly read this as another antivax story, but it doesn't seem to be one; rather, the issue here is that adults need to get DTAP boosters. Who knew? Not me.
- _delirium 16y ago
  Apparently that's new: in the US at least, Tdap was only approved in 2005, and replaced Td (the previous standard bundled tetanus/diptheria every-10-years booster) in most recommendations/clinics around 2006-2007. So adults who haven't had a tetanus booster in the past 3-4 years didn't get the one that includes whooping cough, and probably don't even know about the change (I got my last booster in 2003, and didn't know that it was different now).
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    ... And now I understand why my doctor gave me a tetanus booster last month without even asking if I had had one in the last ten years. (I think I have, but I'm not sure, and I never turn down free tetanus boosters if the doctor offers one.)
- abstractbill 16y ago
  It's both. There's a cluster of "crazy hippy" people in and around Marin who are convinced vaccinations are responsible for every modern ailment. I've met, and tried unsuccessfully to reason with a few of them. The DTAP booster may be our best shot (haha) at routing around them though. Even if they won't vaccinate their children, if enough adults get regular DTAPs we might be able to get enough herd immunity that whooping cough dies out again.
sabat 16y ago

kmfrk 16y ago

I just want to highlight this part of the article for people who are about to close their window without reading it: >The California epidemic has raised plenty of questions about the role of vaccination and the increasing numbers of parents who decide not to vaccinate their children. California’s Department of Public Health cites three schools in the state where 80 percent of parents have signed a “personal belief exemption” to keep their children from being vaccinated. That just blows my mind.

codyrobbins 16y ago
I seriously can’t understand how these vaccinations aren’t mandated by law without exception. The point of vaccination is to protect public health from devastating communicable diseases, just like the point of fire codes are to protect the community from fires that could easily spread from building to building and destroy an entire city. It’s like being able to sign a ‘personal belief exemption’ saying you don’t believe in fire codes in order to exempt your house from them. I’m largely a libertarian, but I certainly don’t want my neighboring houses to all be firetraps.
- rue 16y ago
  > It’s like being able to sign a ‘personal belief exemption’ saying you don’t believe in fire codes in order to exempt your house from them. More like exempting your office building from them.
- philwelch 16y ago
  The "personal belief exemption" should involve being quarantined with the other idiots who refuse vaccinations. At 80%, some neighborhoods seem to already be volunteering for that role.
- Oxryly 16y ago
  I don't thing the metaphor holds up. If you vaccinate your child, why do you care if other children are vaccinated or not? Your kid is immune...
  - 16y ago

c1sc0 16y ago

Everyone should be vaccinated against stupidity, a.k.a. that thing called education.

jacquesm 16y ago

If you think that is scary, this is what I think is scary: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/world/asia/12bug.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/world/asia/12bug.html More and more bacteria are finding the route to antibiotic resistance, MRSA is already quite a problem in some areas causing patients transferred from one hospital to another to be quarantined on the off chance they might be carrier. The whooping cough is a serious risk to infants but mortality for adults is quite low.

philwelch 16y ago
I've actually had MRSA. For many cases they just use different antibiotics for it, combined with physically cleaning the infection site. Mine was small, but my mom had a much larger infection which simply took more time and effort to apply similar techniques. (Fun fact: walking into a student health clinic with a MRSA sore on your arm, walking to the nurse's desk, holding up your arm and asking "what's this?" will get you seen very promptly!) Turns out the primary treatment for antibiotic-resistent bacteria is to use older antibiotics. Bacteria only become resistant to antibiotics that have recently been used--antibiotics that have fallen out of use, there's no evolutionary pressure for bacteria to remain resistant to, so within a number of generations of not encountering that antibiotic, bacteria are suddenly vulnerable to it. The medium term solution is to have between 4 and 6 generations of antibiotics, so hopefully we can just cycle around them as the bacteria catch up. Antibiotic resistance is nothing new, it's just another problem to be solved. NDM-1 may or may not be a major curveball. Personally, until I know for sure, I'll leave the worrying up to the people whose job it is to worry about such things and try to avoid going to India for any elective surgeries anytime soon.

joezydeco 16y ago

Can we rename it "Jenny McCarthy Whooping Cough"?

dalenkruse 16y ago

I contracted whooping cough about 5 years ago at the age of 29. I had no idea what was wrong with me and it took 3 doctors to diagnose it correctly. I can't totally fault the doctor's diagnosis on the initial visit. When you have someone come into your office in late October in Minnesota complaining of coughing and respirator pain, it's probably something pretty common. I was on several different medications for 5 weeks. I would start to feel better while on the medication and then get worse when I finished the medication. At no time did the medication help completely, and my condition worsened at time went by. I had several chest x-rays and they all came back clean. The third doctor I visited finally took interest in my case and expanded the tests and came back with a diagnosis of whooping cough. After I found that out and did my own research (which include listening to sound clips), I knew it was the correct diagnosis. I had a 11-month old son at the time and my main concern was that he would contract it also. Thankfully, that never happened. It took me about 5 months before I was completely healed. I wouldn't wish that disease on my worst enemy. Every time you go into a coughing fit, you feel like you are going to die. I blacked out 3 times from coughing fits. They come up on you very fast and are very intense and uncontrollable. I also lost my voice for about 4 weeks. My advice is to get yourself (and your children if you have any) vaccinated...yesterday!

ra 16y ago
I upvoted you for the personal account. I live in Sydney, Australia and our area currently has a whooping cough outbreak. I'm only aware of this because we have a 3 month old son. When we were making out antinatal visits to the hospital there were whooping cough awareness signs everywhere. We both had tests, I had the antibody but my girlfriend didn't, so she had the vaccination. I had whooping cough when I was very young, so young I don't remember it at all. But thanks for highlighting your experience. Beyond the photocopied flyers on the walls in the hospital, I know nothing about whooping cough (and until just now I didn't even realize it was a serious illness) and I'm pretty sure the general public doesn't either.

julius_geezer 16y ago

Never heard of a booster for this. Will ask at my next physical.