Doctors were concerned about the sudden surge in rib-crushing lung diseases as they reach their highest level in 13 years
Highly contagious whooping cough has risen in the US to levels not seen in more than a decade.
Whooping cough, or whooping cough, is a potentially fatal respiratory infection that causes a cough so severe that it breaks people’s ribs. Recovery from coughing fits causes the ‘whooping’ sound in the chest.
According to government data, the number of reported cases has soared in recent months, more than doubling since mid-September. At the same time, the number of walking pneumonias among toddlers has increased sevenfold since March and doubled among older children.
The CDC confirmed more than 32,000 cases of whooping cough in 2024, a huge 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 among children: from one percent to more than seven percent in the ages of two to four years, and from almost four percent to 7.4 percent in the ages of five to seventeen years.
About a quarter of whooping cough cases have been recorded 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 expect a spike in whooping cough cases every few years, but the Covid pandemic, in which millions of people were isolated and protected from other infectious diseases, offered a rare reprieve.
Now trends suggest whooping cough levels are returning to pre-pandemic levels, while childhood vaccination rates are showing signs of declining.
The vaccination rate among preschoolers was about 92 percent for the 2023-2024 school year, below the 93 percent coverage of the previous year. And the exemption rate for preschoolers rose to 3.3 percent, the highest ever reported in the US.
The infection can be fatal, but rarely. On average, fewer than 20 people die from whooping cough every year.
The CDC confirmed more than 32,000 cases of whooping cough in 2024, a huge increase from the 6,500 cases confirmed in 2023
In addition to causing a severe, sometimes hacking cough, whooping cough also leads to fever, congestion, a whooping sound when breathing in, vomiting, fatigue, and sore throat.
At the same time, parents and pediatricians across the country are reporting an increase in the number of walking pneumonia, a bacterial infection that can cause excessive coughing but does not normally prevent patients from performing their daily tasks.
The rapid spread of walking pneumonia, or mycoplasma pneumonia, is thought to be due to its mild initial symptoms – such as coughing and mild shortness of breath – which allow people to spread the infection while staying active and walking around.
But it can be serious for babies and children. It has led to more children being hospitalized, which experts say may be related to Covid lockdowns blocking children’s exposure to good germs and consequently weakening their immune systems.
In addition to increased hospitalizations due to mycoplasma pneumonia in children, the CDC has reported an increase in infections across all age groups.
However, hard 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 because of their underdeveloped immune systems.
In addition to causing a severe, sometimes hacking cough, whooping cough also leads to fever, congestion, a whooping sound when breathing in, vomiting, fatigue, and sore throat.
The Tdap vaccine is very effective at preventing a life-threatening respiratory infection when given on the correct schedule: 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 15-18 months, and 4-6 years.
Although cases of the infection have increased sixfold since 2023, a study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center shows a major knowledge gap. A third of respondents did not know what whooping cough was or whether there was a vaccine to protect against it.
Whooping cough is generally considered a childhood disease.
People generally believe that childhood vaccinations provide lifelong protection, “which is absolutely not true,” said Dr. Tina Tan, a pediatrician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago.
Pneumonia causes white spots or opaque areas in the lungs. The above patient was a 57-year-old man in 2014
Health officials warned that the infection may initially be difficult to distinguish from a cold because the first signs are a runny nose and sore throat. But about a week later, patients may experience coughing fits that last minutes, have difficulty breathing after coughing, and make a “whoop” sound between coughs.
She added that “adolescents and adults are a major source of community transmission” because their immunity has declined sharply since childhood. They may not become seriously ill themselves, but they are very effective transmitters of infections.
Cases generally increase every three or four years, and public health officials aren’t necessarily surprised by the huge spike that disease monitors have recorded.
That three-year cycle was disrupted by the onset of mass masking and quarantine measures to protect against Covid, hampering the pathogen’s ability to spread as easily from person to person (via respiratory droplets blocked by masks).
Public health officials believe the upturn marks a return to normality.
Dr. Timothy Lishnak, a family medicine specialist at the University of Connecticut, said: ‘It is considered an endemic infection, meaning we have been living with it for quite some time, unlike COVID, an epidemic virus, new to the market. scene.
“And as we get people back into lockdown areas and back to school and other facets of life, you see this spreading because it spreads by exhaling and inhaling the bacteria. So that’s one of the mechanisms by which it starts to increase.”
At the same time, parents say doctors struggle to diagnose the condition in time, often writing it off as a viral infection, cold or flu, which delays timely treatment of children.
Whooping cough rates are rising nationally, but rates were highest in Pennsylvania with more than 2,087 cases, followed by New York with 1,781 cases and Illinois with 1,058 cases.
Whooping cough was a leading cause of infant mortality in the early twentieth century, but that changed when a vaccine became available in the 1940s. Before it became widely available, there were about 200,000 cases of whooping cough each year.
From then through the 1980s, the number of cases per year decreased by more than 90 percent compared to the pre-vaccination era.
However, the number of cases began to gradually increase after the late 1980s, eventually peaking in 2012 with 48,277 cases reported. Since then, case numbers have remained relatively high until the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020.
Several factors have likely contributed to the increase in reported cases of whooping cough, including improved awareness and recognition of the disease by healthcare providers, increased availability and use of laboratory diagnostics for confirmation, improved public health surveillance and reporting systems, and waning immunity associated with whooping cough vaccines. .