Whooping cough- a disease once thought to be eliminated in adolescents and adults is making a comeback, driving pharmaceutical companies to respond with a whooping cough vaccine. Once intended only for children, the whooping cough vaccine is now protecting adolescents and adults from the disease.
Lori Venezia gets her daughter Cassandra vaccinated against whooping cough like clockwork. “I decided to get my daughter vaccinated after I heard that whooping cough can sometimes cause death.”
It’s a disease that was thought to have been practically eradicated through immunization, but since the 1970’s, instances of whooping cough have slowly risen in frequency.
Dr. Mary Jo Dimilia, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Mt. Sinai Hospital says, “Whooping cough causes severe coughing fits that can last for months. The term ‘whooping’ came from a particular symptom of whooping cough, the whooping sound you make as you’re taking a deep breath. Whooping cough can cause people to cough so violently that they vomit. There have been cases of deaths from whooping cough.”
Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, is highly contagious and is passed from person to person when the person coughs or sneezes. Currently, only babies and small children get a series of five shots in the first seven years of life called the DTAP, protecting them against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. Boosters are given every ten years but these only protect against diphtheria and tetanus.
As a result, there have been recent outbreaks where most of the patients were teenagers. Case numbers have tripled since 1980 and almost 50 percent of these cases occur in adolescents. It is believed that one out of every five coughs that last a week or longer in an adolescent is caused by pertussis.
But researchers say an adolescent pertussis booster could reduce the number of young people susceptible to whooping cough to as low as 7%, presuming four out of five adolescents are vaccinated. They believe even if half of the country’s adolescents were boosted, the susceptibility could decline to just 13%. Two drug companies are preparing the new vaccine, with hopes for FDA approval this year.
One drug maker says it will save billions of dollars a year in direct and indirect costs, such as sick days. A major research company, Caro Research, says vaccinating 80% of adolescents against whooping cough would cost $75 million, but would save $70 million in health care costs, making it entirely worthwhile. It is thought that more than 70,000 cases of whooping cough could be prevented through the vaccination program.