Three unvaccinated infants in Kentucky<\/a> have died of whooping cough this year, with many more children and adults infected throughout the country. The U.S., as a whole, is on a bad trajectory. There were 6,600 cases of<\/a> whooping cough in January through March of this year. This is four times more than the same time period last year.<\/p>\n \u201cThese numbers are higher than what we were seeing before the COVID-19 pandemic \u2014 we saw a dip during the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was so much rigorous masking happening, but those numbers have now come back up and are even higher than they were pre-pandemic,\u201d said Li.<\/p>\n The illness is very contagious and can be deadly. Here\u2019s what to know and how to protect your loved ones:<\/p>\n Whooping cough is highly contagious and most severe in infants.<\/p>\n Whooping cough, which is also known as pertussis, is \u201ca bacterial infection that affects the back of the throat, down into the airway and causes really severe inflammation of the airway, and that inflammation results with symptoms such as cough,\u201d said Dr. Ross Newman<\/a>, a pediatrician based in Oregon and a medical communicator on social media<\/a>.<\/p>\n The cough often lasts for weeks or months, according to Newman. It spreads through respiratory droplets<\/a> when someone coughs, sneezes or even talks near you.<\/p>\n At first, the illness looks a lot like a regular cold, \u201cbut it is highly contagious during that time,\u201d said Dr. Melanie Wellington<\/a>, a clinical professor of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Iowa Health Care.<\/p>\n \u201cThen, about a week or two weeks into the illness, the cough changes, and it gets worse and worse and worse,\u201d Wellington added. \u201cAnd the whooping cough name comes from the fact that the cough is so bad that people often will have these coughing fits,\u201d ending with a whooping sound to catch their breath, Wellington said.<\/p>\n This tends to be the case in older kids and adults, but it can cause more severe symptoms in immunocompromised folks and especially infants.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen really young children \u2015 like infants under 1 year of age \u2015 get it, it has a tendency to cause them to go apneic. Apneic means you stop breathing, and that\u2019s obviously supremely dangerous,\u201d Newman said.<\/p>\n The repeated coughing can also cause patients to pull muscles and break ribs, Newman added. \u201cSometimes, especially small infants, they need to be intubated so we can control their lungs… it can be very scary, especially for our little ones,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cThis huge surge that you\u2019re seeing right now is almost completely related to decreased vaccination rate.\u201d<\/p>\n – Dr. Melanie Wellington<\/p>\n Dropping vaccination rates are the reason behind this year\u2019s surge.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause of both political and social media influences, we\u2019re seeing vaccination rates drop across the board for all diseases,\u201d Newman said.<\/p>\n
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