The highly contagious whooping cough has risen to levels in the United States not seen in more than a decade.
Whooping cough, or whooping cough, is a life-threatening respiratory infection that causes a cough so severe that it has been known to fracture people’s ribs. Recovery from coughing attacks creates a “screaming” sound in the chest.
Reported cases have increased in recent months, more than doubling since mid-September, according to government data. At the same time, walking pneumonia infections among young children have increased sevenfold since March and have doubled among older children.
The CDC confirmed more than 32,000 cases of whooping cough in 2024, a massive increase from the 6,500 cases confirmed in 2023.
Similarly, the CDC reported that walking pneumonia cases increased across all age groups in the US from March to October 2024, peaking in August. The largest increase occurred in children, with rates jumping from one percent to more than seven percent at ages two to four and from nearly four percent to 7.4 percent at ages five to four. 17.
About a quarter of whooping cough cases have been reported in Midwestern states, including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania currently leads the nation with the highest number of reported cases.
Public health officials expected spikes in whooping cough cases every few years, but the Covid pandemic, during which millions of people were isolated and protected from other infectious diseases, offered a rare respite.
Now, trends suggest that pertussis levels are returning to pre-pandemic levels, while childhood vaccination rates have shown signs of falling.
The vaccination rate among kindergarteners was about 92 percent for the 2023-2024 school year, down from 93 percent coverage the previous year. And the exemption rate for kindergartners rose to 3.3 percent, the highest ever recorded in the United States.
The infection can be fatal, but rarely is. An average of fewer than 20 people die annually from whooping cough.
The CDC confirmed more than 32,000 cases of whooping cough in 2024, a massive increase from the 6,500 cases confirmed in 2023.
In addition to causing a severe cough, sometimes with cracking ribs, whooping cough causes fever, congestion, whooping noise when inhaling, vomiting, fatigue, and sore throat.
At the same time, parents and pediatricians across the country are reporting increases in walking pneumonia, a bacterial infection that can cause excessive coughing but does not typically leave patients unable to perform daily tasks.
The rapid spread of walking pneumonia, or mycoplasma pneumonia, is thought to be due to its mild initial symptoms, such as cough and slight shortness of breath, which allow people to spread the infection while remaining active and walking.
But it can be serious for babies and children. It has led to more children being hospitalized, which experts say may be linked to Covid lockdowns blocking children’s exposure to good germs and weakening their immune systems as a result.
In addition to the increase in hospitalizations for mycoplasma pneumonia among children, the CDC has reported an increase in infections in all age groups.
However, firm figures are difficult to obtain because there is no national reporting or surveillance system for mycoplasma pneumonia infections.
Whooping cough can be a serious infection for people of all ages, but babies under one year old are particularly susceptible due to their underdeveloped immune system.
In addition to causing a severe cough, sometimes with cracking ribs, whooping cough causes fever, congestion, whooping noise when inhaling, vomiting, fatigue, and sore throat.
The Tdap vaccine is very effective at preventing a life-threatening respiratory infection if given on the correct schedule: 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 15 to 18 months, and 4 to 6 years.
Although the number of infection cases has increased sixfold since 2023, a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania shows a large gap in knowledge. A third of those surveyed did not know what whooping cough was or that a vaccine existed to protect against it.
Whooping cough is generally considered a pediatric disease.
People generally believe that childhood vaccines offer lifelong protection, “which is completely false,” according to Dr. Tina Tan, a pediatrician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago.
Pneumonia causes white spots or opaque areas to appear in the lungs. The previous patient was a 57-year-old man in 2014.
Health officials warned that it is initially difficult to differentiate the infection from a cold, as the first signs are a runny nose and sore throat. But about a week later, patients may develop coughing fits that last minutes, have difficulty breathing after coughing, and make a “screaming” sound between coughs.
He added that “adolescents and adults constitute a major source of community transmission” because their immunity has greatly decreased since childhood. They may not get seriously ill themselves, but they are very effective transmitters of infections.
Cases generally increase every three or four years, and public health officials are not necessarily surprised by the massive increase that disease monitors have recorded.
That three-year cycle was interrupted with the appearance of massive masking and quarantine measures to protect against Covid, which prevented the pathogen from spreading from person to person as easily (through respiratory droplets blocked by masks).
Public health officials believe the increase means a return to normal.
Dr. Timothy Lishnak, a family medicine specialist at the University of Connecticut, said: “It’s considered an endemic infection, meaning we’ve been coexisting with it for quite some time, unlike COVID, which was an epidemic, new virus. in the world.” scene.
‘And as we start to get people back into contained areas and back to school and other facets of life, we’re seeing this spread because it’s transmitted by exhaling and breathing in the bacteria. So that’s one of the mechanisms by which it starts to increase.”
At the same time, parents say doctors have difficulty diagnosing the condition in time, often dismissing it as a viral infection, cold or flu, delaying timely treatment for children.
Pertussis rates are increasing nationwide, but the highest rates were reported in Pennsylvania with more than 2,087 cases, followed by New York with 1,781 cases and Illinois with 1,058.
Whooping cough was a major cause of childhood death in the early 20th century, but that changed with the debut of a vaccine in the 1940s. Before it was widely available, there were about 200,000 cases of whooping cough a year.
From then until the 1980s, the number of cases per year has decreased by more than 90 percent compared to the pre-vaccine era.
However, cases began to gradually increase after the end of the 1980s, finally peaking in 2012 with 48,277 reported cases. Since then, the number of cases has remained relatively high until the start of the pandemic in 2020.
Several factors likely contributed to the increase in reported cases of pertussis, including increased awareness and recognition of the disease by health care providers, increased availability and use of laboratory diagnostics for confirmation, improved reporting systems, and public health surveillance, and a decline in immunity associated with pertussis vaccines. .