An infant receives a routine vaccination at First Georgia Physician Group Pediatrics in Fayetteville, Georgia, in 2021. Infectious disease experts say a decrease in in-person visits during the pandemic has led to children not staying up to date on whooping cough vaccinations. Angie Wang/AP Hide caption
Toggle caption Angie Wang/AP
The number of whooping cough cases in the United States has more than quadrupled since last year, according to data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Infectious disease experts believe the surge in whooping cough cases is due to a decline in vaccination rates that began during the pandemic.
“Children during COVID aren’t seeing health care providers, and they may have had telehealth care, but they can’t be vaccinated through a computer,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, “and we’re not all back to normal vaccination levels yet.”
The whooping cough vaccines, called DTap and TDap, also protect against diphtheria and tetanus and provide the most effective prevention against whooping cough and its complications.
Previous studies have raised concerns that the pertussis vaccine’s effectiveness is short-lived, leading some experts to call for a new vaccine.
The CDC said in July that reported cases of whooping cough were returning to pre-pandemic levels, when the disease saw more than 10,000 cases annually in the U.S. The agency has recorded 14,569 cases so far this year, up from a total of 3,475 recorded last year.
The states that have the most cases are Pennsylvania, New York and California, in that order, with Pennsylvania recording 2,008 cases so far this year, nearly double California’s number.
Because the early symptoms of whooping cough can be mistaken for a cold or other respiratory illness, it often goes unnoticed until it becomes severe.
The difficulty in diagnosing the disease makes it easier for people to unintentionally spread it, said Dawn Nolt, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland, Oregon.
“For the first week or so when you get sick, it looks similar to any other respiratory illness,” she says, “but it could actually be whooping cough, and you’re just spreading it to people around you.”
Nolt said what makes whooping cough different from other respiratory illnesses is the long, intermittent cough that lasts for at least three weeks and can last for months.
Vanderbilt’s Schaffner said inflammation of the mucous membranes often leads to debilitating coughing fits.
“It’s not one or two coughs, it’s a series of coughs that make it hard to breathe,” he says, “and then when you’re pretty exhausted, the coughing fit finally ends, you take a breath, and that’s the ‘whoosh’ sound.”
However, your baby may not cough as much, but rather may have difficulty breathing or may stop breathing intermittently.
The CDC recommends the DTaP vaccine for infants and children under age 7. Older children and adults are recommended to receive the vaccine plus a booster shot every 10 years.
The most severe cases are in infants, whose small airways are more likely to become blocked, Schaffner said. Because infants can’t be vaccinated until they’re 2 months old, the CDC recommends that pregnant women get vaccinated early in the third trimester to protect their newborns.
