Plenty of immunised children still getting whooping cough.

[spidermama]

Here .
Like with so many other illnesses, the doctors have been unwilling or reluctant to correctly diagnose it because they falsely believe people who'vew been immunised are very unlikely to contract it. Not true.

Yes, yes indeed. My mother actually got it twice, and she had whooping cough as a child. Her doctor told her there is more than one strain. B/c she had it as a child, when she got it again, it was mild - just a persistent, nagging cough. She thought she might have TB. It took a while for them to twig it could be whooping cough.

My BIL had whooping cough and he had been immunised. No one would believe my MIL, but she'd had whooping cough and the age of 9 and just knew he had it, too. He was finally officially diagnosed after she fought w/the GP.

My mum remembers it well, WW. There was no vaccine when she got it - 1950.

My dad had it at age 5 - 1941 - and he still remembers it vividly, probably b/c he had it the day Pearl Harbour was struck.

[science hat]
It's also a bitch to diagnose in the lab - the bacteria is a fussy little madam and needs special coddling to be detected. Even more awkwardly the best sample is a nasopharyngeal swab, which is deeply unpleasant for both patient and doc - in fact most GPs won't do it.
The quick DNA test costs so much they'll only use it on infants in intensive care, and the blood test is only worth doing if you've had the cough for more than 3 weeks.

Agree this doesn't mean that GPs shouldn't be alert to it - in fact it should make them more alert to it as the diagnosis rests with them and not the lab. And the treatment's only two weeks of antibs, not anything mad.

There was a paper about this published in 2002. They found a new strain of whooping cough was common in certain areas, which was not protected against by vaccination, and had evolved because of vaccination (supposedly). And the HA's response? To re-vaccinate everyone. Riiiigghht. You're correct expat, they smoke crack

My friend had it at the same time as I had measles. We played together during our quarantine from school period. I remember her running off to puke up all the time.

Fastforward 30 years and all 4 of her children had it, being a bit dozy we sat there with ds1 (3) and ds2 - 4 months old- unvaccinated- in the same room- saying "gosh that sounds a bit like whooping cough"- they were diagnosed 2 days later. Anyway historuy repeated itself because ds2 didn't get it (neither did ds1- although he was vaccinated anyway). Susceptibility playing a role I think.....

I had it when I was younger. I was vaccinated against it, and it was a pretty mild case. But it was diagnosed.

Someone on the radio this morning said immunity was known to wear off, but it gave protection for the time when the disease is most dangerous ie in babies.

I got it twice - once as a toddler and again when I was 13, but the second bout was milder.

Some people just throw things off, JJ. I'm honestly convinced of this - DH is one of them. So is my dad.

I also picked up a nasty strain of Hong Kong, avian flu when we were living abroad when I was 7. My mum and sister caught it. But my dad never did.

He also managed to lick diphtheria in a week and typhoid as well.

People like The Informed Parent have been reporting stories like this for ages now. Whooping cough is not the only disease doctors have been reluctant to diagnose. It just goes to show their unshakable faith in vaccination programmes HAS to be questioned.

DS had it at 2 weeks (so pre-vaccination) and it still took them 3 weeks and 4 visits to diagnose. I had it at the same time (had been vaccinated as a child) but wasn't officially diagnosed (although given that's what DS had it was bloody obvious that it was what I had too). So medical records will show one unvaccinated person who caught whooping cough and one vaccinated person with "a nasty cough". Of course it's under-diagnosed (I'm surprised it gets diagnosed so often even in the unvaccinated, given that DS had to turn blue actually in front of a doctor before it was raised as a possibility).

P.S. It is much worse in babies so the vaccination programme isn't necessarily misplaced, even if it only gives a few years' partial protection. But IMO the government/medical establishment needs to realise that very often if you have a mass vaccination programme targeted at the very young then you either have to combine it with a booster programme for teenagers/adults or find the disease resurfacing in epidemics in the teenage/adult population as the protection wears off (as per this story and various mumps outbreaks).

Surely now they need to look at the diagnosis of other diseases which are supposed to be kept at bay by vaccinations but which aren't.
There's a general reluctance from GPs to dx diseases when people have been vaccinated against them which means the figures for the incidence of such diseases are wrong.

Leah it must have been really awful your ds getting it at two weeks.

I disagree with the booster idea though. The fact is the jab doesn't work, so don't bother giving it again.

I'm not sure it entirely doesn't work. I was vaccinated, my younger brothers weren't, and when whooping cough came round they both got it and I didn't (which is why I didn't have any natural immunity and hence managed to catch it last year). So far as I can see the evidence suggests that it reduces the incidence and severity of whooping cough for a few years after vaccination.

My point's more a general one -- immunisation gets presented to the public as offering lifelong immunity, when often it doesn't, and as a result either you boost or you risk the disease later. Which of the two is the better option depends on you/disease/vaccine effectiveness/probably a bunch of other factors.

Indeed, I wouldn't suggest a whooping cough booster programme either (except perhaps for the frail elderly with no natural immunity -- wouldn't apply to current generation of elderly as they'll have been exposed earlier), given that almost all fatalities occur in the under-ones. I don't think a clear enough case could be made for the benefits. But the fact that (with no booster programme) you get outbreaks among previously-vaccinated people is rather a "well, duh!" one.

Actually leah it's not so 'well duh!' as if you read the link the study was finding the disease in fully vaccinated children under four. They hadn't reached a stage where a booster would be considered so the bare fact is that the vaccine didn't work on a very large proportion of children.

i was told by a paediatrician, when dd1 had whooping cough, that the vaccination either works or it doesnt, and that it fails quite a good percentage

The story doesn't say that.

It says "In 2004, there were 237 cases [of whooping cough] among children aged four and under, rising to 289 in 2005." -- no comment on whether they were vaccinated or not. DS will have been one of the 289 from 2005, and he wasn't vaccinated.

Then it says that the study itself "looked at 172 children aged five to 16 years of age", so not children under four, although most of them were vaccinated. I've not seen how they reported their results -- would be interesting to see if the incidence of whooping cough was greater among the 16 year olds than among the 5 year olds and if so by how much.

lou- I;ve always understood it to be like that as well. My (vaccinated) friend who had it as a child had a full dose. IIRC it works approx 80% of the time, so not 20%. had a discussion about it with a locum GP when I was trying to decide whether to vaccinate ds2 or not. he thought 80% was good coverage, I thought a bit ropy.

At least one recent study ('Clinical presentation of pertussis in unvaccinated and vaccinated children in the first six years of life' Pediatrics. 2003 Nov;112(5):1069-75) found that the duration of the cough was several days shorter in vaccinated than in non-vaccinated children who caught whooping cough. It wasn't a whole lot shorter, though (something like five days, from memory), and personally I'd be more interested in whether there was any statistically significant difference in the rate of complications or in the frequency of cough -- I don't know that anyone's ever done that study.

(I actually have that study in my "interesting stuff about whooping cough" list for a completely different reason, because it also showed that where antibiotics were given (generally prescribed to stop the patient being infectious and because "if given early enough it can reduce the severity") the duration of cough was, in fact, statistically quite a bit longer than in cases where no antibiotics were given).

dd1 wasnt allowed to be vaccinated at the time, and she got whooping cough

she was so ill, she missed 6m of school