Whooping cough is back

As the name would suggest, the illness is manifested in a fierce, nauseant cough. The whooping cough bacteria emit a toxin that attacks the tissue in the bronchial tubes, causing unpleasant, aggressive coughing that can last up to several months.

The microbes take up a position in the nose and nasopharynx during the first stage of the illness and the patient begins to cough. At this stage, which lasts roughly seven to ten days, the illness can be influenced by antibiotics and detected with a throat swab and bacteria cultivation. The infection then moves on to the second stage, during which there are unexpected fits of very irritating coughing accompanied by breathlessness, retching and even cyanosis  among children. This stage lasts an average of 4 to 8 weeks, before the cough gradually disappears. The illness is very unpleasant and can truly torment the sufferer.

Whooping cough is on the rise in many European countries and nobody is entirely sure why the illness is now returning. Experts most often ascribe the higher incidence of infections to changes in the properties of the microbe, but there is also talk of the lower effectiveness of the vaccine, which has different ingredients than before as a result of attempts to be more gentle. The illness spreads relatively easily through the air and is helped by the fact that, at the beginning, when the illness is at its most infectious, nobody knows they have whooping cough because at the start, the infection manifests itself as an unspecific inflammation of the upper airways. Catching the illness is also complicated by the relatively expensive tests involved.

Luckily, whooping cough is not fatal to adults, but it can have lethal consequences for small children. That is why doctors recommend vaccination every ten years or so and, as a means of protecting unvaccinated babies, the Cocoon strategy, whereby all the people in the close surroundings of the baby are vaccinated.

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