It started with a slight fever.
Then a slight cough came on the little girl. It didn’t alarm her parents until they woke up early one morning to a sound they had never heard their daughter make. It was a hard cough that was different, coughs with little gasps or whoops in between.
“It was really odd,” her father said of the sound of his daughter’s cough. “I had a little sinking feeling. It was obvious what it was.”
The little girl had whooping cough,
an old disease that hangs on and is
currently casting a shadow over Santa Barbara County and California. The girl
is one of the lucky ones. Her case turned out to be mild, and she recovered quickly without any complications. Others haven’t been so lucky.
There have been six confirmed cases of whooping cough in Santa Barbara County this year, and one child has already been sent to the hospital, said Public Health Department spokesperson Susan Klein-Rothschild.
By contrast, there were 139 confirmed cases of whooping cough in San Luis Obispo County so far this year, according to San Luis Obispo County Health Department officials. Five children have died from whooping cough in California this year.
“This is the highest numbers we’ve ever seen in the county,” said Christine Gaiger, the department’s communicable disease manager. “It’s never been this bad.”
When asked why there’s such a large discrepancy between the two counties, Klein-Rothschild said, “I can’t give you an exact reason, but I can tell you it depends on who’s been vaccinated, who’s been exposed, and how quickly it’s treated.”
Symptoms of the disease include what seems like a cold, and then a cough that lasts for weeks, followed by an episode of severe coughing, along with whooping and sometimes vomiting. A child in the throes of whooping cough may turn blue from lack of oxygen. The disease is very contagious and can be transmitted by anyone close to a carrier.
The California Department of Health has declared the outbreak, which began in June, an epidemic and advised parents to get their children vaccinated. The department is predicting this outbreak of whooping cough could be the worse in California in nearly 50 years. There are 910 confirmed cases in California and thousands more are believed sick with the cough, also called by its scientific name, pertussis.
Though never in the big leagues of killer diseases, whooping cough, along with polio and influenza, was one of the afflictions that terrified parents of the early and mid 20th century. A vaccine was developed in the 1940s, and the wide acceptance of inoculations against the sickness nearly wiped out the disease.
Since the 1980s, however, whooping cough has gradually come back. Scientists believe the disease can spread unnoticed in the adult population and then strike the young, who are especially vulnerable to the disease.
It sweeps through in cycles of two to five years, said Mike Sicilia, a spokesman for the California Department of Health. As people hear about the sickness, parents get their children vaccinated and whooping cough seems to almost disappear. Then, as the population forgets about the disease, immunization drops off and the affliction returns.
“Our last big outbreak happened in 2005, so we’re on that point where we start to see a resurgence,” said Nancy Rosenberg, immunization program administrator with the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department.
A movement by parents to not vaccinate their children could also be a factor in the resurgence, Sicilia said.
Vaccination for whooping cough begins when a child is two months old, but it takes a series of five shots, completed by 16 months, for full and adequate protection. However, the shots tend to wear off by the time the child reaches the end of junior high school.
California is one of 11 states that don’t require a booster shot in middle school, which some scientists believe could be a reason the state is one of the prime breeding grounds for the disease.
Rosenberg said adults with whooping cough don’t get the classic whooping sound to their cough, so many will simply assume they have a persistent cough and won’t think they’re infectious.
That’s one of the reasons, she said, that the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department is recommending people get vaccinated, especially those who come into contact with children under the age of 1 year old.
“The most common way young infants catch whooping cough is from their parents or caregivers,” she said. “We’re asking
anyone that has close contact with infants to be up on their TDAP [Tetanus, Diphtheria, Pertussis annoculation] or whooping cough vaccinations.”
For more information about whooping cough, including vaccinations and other prevention tactics, visit sbcphd.org or slopublic health.org. m
Robert McDonald is a staff writer at New Times, the Sun’s sister paper to the north. Sun News Editor Amy Asman and Staff Writer Nicholas Walter contributed to this story. Send comments to rmcdonald@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jul 8-15, 2010.