Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, is a highly contagious bacterial disease that attacks the respiratory system and causes uncontrollable coughing.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States had the highest number of whooping cough cases since 1955 with 48,000 cases and 18 deaths. Most of the deaths occurred among infants.
“Not vaccinating your child is not a benign decision. It has real health consequences to the individual child and to the community,” explained study senior author Saad Omer, an associate professor of global health, epidemiology and pediatrics at Emory University in Atlanta.
Researchers compared areas in which the majority of parents chose not to vaccinate their children for non-medical reasons to areas that were affected by the whooping cough outbreak in California back in 2010. They found that children living in areas where the parents refused vaccines were 2.5 times more likely to contract whooping cough. The 2010 outbreak in California sickened more than 9,000 people and killed 10. During the research, 39 other areas with high rates of vaccine refusals had a large number of children with whooping cough.
“Our findings suggest that communities with large numbers of intentionally unvaccinated or undervaccinated persons can lead to pertussis outbreaks,” the researchers wrote in the Sept. 30 issue of the journal Pediatrics.
“In the presence of limited vaccine effectiveness and waning immunity, sustained community level transmission can occur, putting those who are most susceptible to communicable diseases, such as young infants, at increased risk,” said the researchers, from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Emory University School of Public Health and the California Department of Public Health.
