U.S. Heading for Record Whooping Cough Epidemic

There have already been 18,000 cases of whooping in the U.S. this year, more than double the number seen at this point last year. Nine children have already died. At this rate, 2012 will become the worst year for whooping cough since 1959, when near 40,000 cases were reported.

Prior to the era of mass vaccination for Pertussis (whooping cough), the U.S. saw nearly 150,000 cases per year, with as many as 8,000 deaths. However, for the past decade a mass hysteria about vaccines (see here, here and here) has prompted thousands of parents to forgo Pertussis and other vaccinations for their children, causing a sharp rise in infections and preventable deaths. Ironically, a large percentage of these parents come from well-educated, affluent backgrounds.

Anti-Vaxxers Unite! Schools and Paranoid Parents Team Up to Undermine Public Safety

Santa and Reindeer quarantine with Pertussis (by Richard Croft)

For the first time in fourteen years of teaching I am seeing students marked absent by the attendance office for failing to get their required vaccinations. With California’s new requirement that all teenagers get DTAP boosters against whooping cough (pertussis), schools across the state are seeing declines in daily attendance as unvaccinated students are being barred from attending class.

The law makes sound public health sense. Whooping cough is not an ordinary respiratory infection like the common cold. It is often deadly, particularly for infants. In fact, ten children died of the disease in California last year, in the state’s worst outbreak in sixty years. While the majority of infected children do not die, the disease is still far from trivial. Hospitalizations are common, as are protracted absences from school. Students sometimes miss 2-4 weeks of school while they recover from the disease. Furthermore, if an infected student does attend class, approximately 50-80% of all unvaccinated children will contract the disease (see The California Report, KQED, 9/21/11).

The increase in pertussis cases was due primarily to declining vaccination rates among the state’s children and the fact that the vaccine does not confer life-long immunity, like the polio vaccine does. In order to maintain one’s protection, booster shots are required during the teen years. However, many parents used the “personal belief” exemption to get their kids exempted, which allows parents to avoid vaccinations for their kids for virtually any reason at all, including the misperception that vaccines are dangerous.

One rarely discussed repercussion of California’s new vaccination law has been a worsening of schools’ financial woes. Most schools depend heavily on state funding which is based on Average Daily Attendance (ADA). As a result, schools with high rates of absenteeism lose substantial funding.

Some school districts, like the Natomas Unified District near Sacramento, are responding by ignoring the law and allowing unvaccinated students to attend school, in flagrant disregard for the health and safety of their other students and staff (see California Report, KQED, 9/21/11), so they can keep their ADA numbers high. Some have taken the “precaution” of quarantining the unvaccinated students in their gymnasiums or libraries, which is probably still a violation of education code or other state laws requiring equal access. It certainly deprives these students of the same learning environments as their peers and makes lab science classes impossible.

Quarantine (by Anonymous)

This tactic to save money could end up backfiring. If unvaccinated students infect their peers, a school could have a large outbreak and end up with far more absences than they would if they simply obeyed the law and kept unvaccinated students home.

Contrary to the paranoid delusional perspectives of some parents, vaccines like the DTAP vaccine are not only safe, but do a much better job protecting children from a serious illness than leaving them unvaccinated. If we compare this year with last, there have only been 10 new pertussis cases in Marin County, one of the worst hit (and least vaccinated) counties in the state last year, with 350 cases.

While it is still not entirely clear why they had such a dramatic turnaround, we do know that Marin health officials launched an intensive public education campaign and offered free vaccine clinics to support the new state requirement that all middle and high school students have up-to-date pertussis vaccinations. It is very likely that the new law, combined with the outreach campaign contributed to the dramatic decline.

According to the Bay Citizen, the Marin outreach campaign was quite extensive and included letters to parents, a middle school poster contest, public service announcements and free vaccinations for those who could not afford them. There were also five back-to-school clinics over the summer that provided vaccinations. And it wasn’t just children. Parents got boosters, too, helping to bring the community closer to achieving herd immunity and further reducing the chances of contracting the disease.

However, the problem seems to be growing in other counties. According to the California Report, there are still 2,000 students in San Francisco Unified, 16,000 in San Diego Unified, 45,000 in Long Beach Unified, and 209,000 in Los Angeles Unified who still need to be vaccinated.

California’s Whooping Cough Epidemic (And New School Vaccination Requirement)

There have already been 733 reported cases of whooping cough (Pertussis) in California this year, with 78 cases just in Contra Costa County, according to the Bay Citizen. In 2010, the county had 205 cases for the entire year, while there were over 8,000 cases throughout California, the most since 1947. Last year, 10 infants died of the disease in California.

Pertussis is a serious respiratory infection that is treatable with antibiotics and preventable with vaccines. While it can be deadly for babies, it can still cause healthy older children and adults to miss weeks of school or work and even require hospitalization. There has been an upsurge of infections in California among some unvaccinated immigrants and especially among unvaccinated middle class native born children whose parents ostensibly have bought into the anti-vaccine hysteria.

A new state law now requires students in grades 7 through 12 to show proof of vaccination for Pertussis before they go to school, including a recent booster. (The dtap vaccine given to toddlers does not give life-long protection against whooping cough, as do the vaccines for mumps and measles). State Superintendent Tom Torlakson recently produced a video message to inform parents of the new law and the dangers of Pertussis.