Discover Top Posts Tagged with #pertussis

It's called Whooping Cough because it makes you whoop for joy! woohoo yay yippee!!!

My grandfather wanted to be an opera singer.

But, you see, his youngest brother died of whooping cough, just a few years before the Pertussis vaccine would be developed.

So my grandfather did not become an opera singer. He always loved opera, listened to it, would sing along to his vinyl records of it, play it on the radio whenever he could. But it wasn't his profession.

No. He became a pediatrician.

It's about what kind of world he wanted to live in, you know?

Whooping cough has been surging in the United States for months and the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention s

I'm so sad and so angry.

Also, you need a TDaP booster (Diptheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis) every 10 years. People generally forget about it as an adult unless they have a tetanus scare, but if you are ever regularly around kids, it's important to stay up to date.

The Measles vaccine is good for life, especially if you got the full 2 doses as a kid. But DTaP/TDaP is different! Make sure you have that up to date!

#vaccines #whooping cough #pertussis #dtap

Children deserve better than their MAGA/MAHA parents. This is abuse.

Kids are not props.

Why would anyone want to be around parents or families that put other kids at risk?

Think about other people.

#whooping cough #pertussis #florida

Just washing your hands won't stop you from contracting an airborne illness like covid, flu, RSV, and others. You have to wear a mask.

#covid #mask up #public health #wear a mask #wear a respirator #still coviding #pandemic #covid 19 #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #flu #influenza #rsv #whooping cough #pertussis #measles

In an NBC News data investigation of 31 states, about 70% of counties and jurisdictions fell below the target vaccination rate needed for co

In an NBC News data investigation of 31 states, about 70% of counties and jurisdictions fell below the target vaccination rate needed for community protection.

Dec. 17, 2025, 3:47 PM MST

By Erika Edwards, Anne Thompson, Jason Kane, Joe Murphy and Mustafa Fattah

The newborn was coughing so badly, her skin turned a sickly gray-blue color. Her face contorted as she tried to gulp air.

“I think the longest she would stop breathing was about 10, 11 seconds,” said her mother, Sophie Owens, 24.

Soon, Feleena was airlifted to Dallas, about 80 miles away from the small city of Sulphur Springs, Texas, near where the Owenses lived at the time.

“They did tell us that if we didn’t bring her in when we did, there is a high possibility she wouldn’t have seen the next day,” her father, Justin Owens, said.

Feleena had pertussis, or whooping cough. She spent the next several weeks of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit. For more than a week, she was on a ventilator, tubes running in and out of her tiny body, her mother said.

#pertussis #whooping cough #child vaccination

Antivaxxers are not responsible* for the current pertussis outbreak. In fact, rich countries are! Here's how:

Whooping Cough, also called pertussis is back in a big way in the US right now. Other nations are also seeing outbreaks, particularly 'rich' or 'first world' or 'developed' nations. Wait what? Rich countries are having a bigger increase in whooping cough than countries with limited healthcare infrastructure? You're probably thinking 'ah, it's the antivaxxers, isn't it?' While they're contributing to the problem, but no, they're not in fact THE PROBLEM. In fact, even fully vaccinated people in rich countries are at risk for pertussis. The first thing to understand is that there are two 'generations' of pertussis vaccine available at present. Both are given in combination with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. As far as I know, tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis are given together in every mainstream formulation of pertussis vaccine globally. The OG (first gen) pertussis vaccine was the DTP vaccine which contains a whole cell inactivated pertussis bacteria so when it is given, the body develops a robust immune response to every antigen (the thing your body can learn to make antibodies to recognise) on the surface of the pertussis bacteria. It is still used in countries where money is tight because it's cheaper to make and the immune response is robust and long-lasting--5-10 years depending on your source. Unfortunately, side effects were higher with the OG. Some children spike high fevers causing febrile seizures (which are terrifying even though they're benign), arm pain is more intense, and people feel worse after getting it. A miniscule number of children given the OG suffer encephalitis and more serious neurological effects, though most cases self-resolve. In rich countries, as the incidence of pertussis (and diphtheria and tetanus) fell with robust vaccination programs, people became more and more afraid of the side effects of the DTP vaccine. Those side effects sound scarier when there's lower risk of pertussis. There were also ever-growing antivaccine movements because since there has been inoculation (a precursor medical practice to vaccination that goes back all the way to ancient China) there have been opponents inoculation and vaccination. Antivaxxers are not new and modern. They have always been there and they were PISSED about the encephalitis. So both antivaxxers and provaxxers who were starting to forget how scary it is to watch a baby with pertussis said 'we need a better option'. This brings us to 2nd gen vaccines, the acellular pertussis vaccines DTaP and Tdap. The little a stands for 'acellular', meaning that there is no longer a whole dead bacteria cell as our antigen. We use specific cut-up antigens instead. Most formulations use 3-5 different antigens. This results in much lower side effects! Immunity without side effects is the goal! The problem is that this vaccine doesn't last as long. In fact, for 0-10 year old children, 98% are immune at 1 year after vaccination while 81% are immune at 5 years after vaccination. For 11-20 year olds, those numbers drop to 72% at one year and 42% at 5 years after vaccination. For people who are older, those numbers drop even faster. And the acellular vaccines aren't as good at preventing infection--they're more like the covid vaccines in that rather than stopping infection, they make the symptoms less bad. And those 3-5 antigens in the acellular vaccine are becoming less common on the surface of the bordatella pertussis bacteria. Yup. It's out-evolving the vaccine. So where does this leave us? 1) Make sure your pertussis vaccine is up to date. This protects you against the effects of a very serious illness. 2) If you have been exposed to pertussis TALK TO YOUR DOCTOR ABOUT PROPHYLACTIC ANTIBIOTICS. After an hour in a room with someone who has pertussis, if your body doesn't have sufficient immunity there's up to a 90% chance of you getting it and you will be sick for months. This is one of the ONLY CASES EVER where you should be getting prophylactic antibiotics. Usually, I would say do not get prophylactic antibiotics. This is a special case.

3) If a third gen vaccine comes out (many are in development), update your pertussis shot! 4) IF YOU FEEL SICK AND HAVE A COUGH, STAY HOME. If you cannot stay home, then you should wear a well-fitted disposable n95, kn95, or surgical mask (in order of preference) at all times around other people. 5) Mask in crowded public spaces and on airplanes even if you feel well.

#pertussis #bordatella pertussis #tw sick kids #tw death #vaccines #get vaccinated

From AP feed: big walkout at CDC Atlanta headquarters right now:

* * * *

You are not hallucinating

Lucian K. Truscott IV

Aug 28, 2025

Reading the news these last few days feels like being in the depths of a fever. RFK Jr. fires CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, who was confirmed by the Senate only a month ago, because she refused to go along with his new COVID vaccine policy. She refuses to leave her job, her lawyer telling Kennedy that only the president can fire her, so Trump steps in last night and slams the door on Monarez, a spokesman saying she is “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” Yes, the capitalized words are in the official statement.

All this after Kennedy moved to limit access to the new COVID vaccine to people over 65 or those who “have other health problems,” according to NPR. Tuesday at Trump’s Praiseworthy cabinet meeting, Kennedy informed his fellow ignoramuses that in September, he will have autism all figured out. This after he announced to the world that the Hepatitis B vaccine should not be given to infants because it is for “prostitutes and promiscuous gay men.”

It’s tempting to say that you can’t make this stuff up, but then, the policies being implemented by Trump’s entire administration fit that description. In fact, it’s impossible to come up with a list of all the outrages perpetrated by this gaggle of criminally negligent incompetents. The New York Times and the Washington Post are regularly criticized for not keeping up with reporting on the damage being done by Trump and his acolytes.

We have entered a time and space separate from the reality of this earth in the here and now. The closest I can come to describing it is having a high fever, when you drift off into a nether world of being neither awake nor hallucinating. It happened to me in the hospital back in January when I came down with a particularly bad case of the flu. It felt like I couldn’t sleep or stay awake. Until the fever broke, I was in a state of abnormal consciousness.

That is where we are right now. Because what is happening to the world we live in should not be allowed to happen, we cannot get an adequate grasp on ourselves or our surroundings. It seems unreal that a maniacal anti-vaxxer and former drug addict who has been accused of “forcibly groping” a family babysitter and has spent the last decade or more papering the planet with lies about vaccines is running the 80,000 employee Department of Health and Human Services. He is a man who felt compelled to issue a written apology to the woman in question – by text message, naturally. Now this abusive monster is making decisions that will lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, from infants to the elderly, according to every medical and health policy expert anyone has ever interviewed.

You are not hallucinating. This is really happening. People are coming down with pertussis – whooping cough – 35,000 cases last year, the highest number in decades. There have been 6,600 cases of pertussis so far this year, more than four times the number of cases at the same time last year, according to CNN. Unvaccinated children are dying of this disease – six under the age of one year during 2024 alone. Kennedy has said he wants vaccinations to be “voluntary.” They’re trying that in Louisiana, the governor announcing that the state will no longer “promote vaccines.” Two children have died in Louisiana from pertussis. A hundred and ten came down with the terrible disease in the first three months of this year, almost as many as the number of cases for all of last year.

And pertussis is only one disease easily preventable by vaccination.

You must use numbers to catalog the statistics for pertussis, for measles, for COVID. But numbers are not enough. An infant with whooping cough frequently comes down with pneumonia. The baby’s coughing is so severe, it makes putting them on a ventilator more difficult. “They just never stop coughing,” Dr. John Schieffelin, associate professor of pediatrics at Tulane University told CNN. “They’re just coughing so much, they can’t eat, they can’t drink.”

Try to think of that for a moment. He’s talking about a baby less than a year old, a little thing you could hold with one hand. The baby is coughing and coughing so hard that it can’t breathe. The hospital throws every machine they’ve got at the little baby. Nothing works. The baby’s parents are standing in the hall on the other side of a glass window, watching as the baby’s body stops convulsing and dies.

You look at the perpetually angry face of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You are not hallucinating. He went on Fox News after the firing of the CDC director and the resignations yesterday of four top CDC officials in protest. This is what Kennedy told the salivating hosts of Fox News about the CDC this morning. “The agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it. It may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”

According to Kennedy and Donald Trump, it may be that a pill used to treat roundworm in large animals like horses and cows will cure measles and COVID. It may be that changing your diet and eating healthy food and exercising more will cure your infertility, as we learned the Department of Health and Human Services is considering as an alternative to IVF this week. It may be that measles can be cured with cod liver oil and hot compresses on the forehead.

It may be that we are not hallucinating, but what is happening right now in Washington D.C. is causing us to lose our minds. And it may be our minds are not all we will lose.

The patient is running a fever. The patient may live, or the patient may die. We may know “in a matter of two weeks,” as Donald Trump is fond of telling us. Or we may be arrested and spirited off to a cage in a concentration camp somewhere, and no one – not our family, not our friends, not even our lawyer – will know where we are or what is being done to us.

You are not hallucinating. This is real.

#RFK Jr.#vaccinations #resignations #FOX “News”#pertussis #CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez #public health #science #autism #CDC

Nunavut's Department of Health announced the outbreaks in a pair of news releases Saturday. It's urging people to get vaccinated against the

There's an outbreak of whooping cough in Iqaluit and Pond Inlet, Nunavut, according to the territory's chief public health officer. The Department of Health announced the outbreaks in a pair of news releases Saturday. It said anyone can get the respiratory disease — also known as pertussis — but that the most severe cases are in children under the age of one. Though it spreads easily from person to person, the department says it's preventable by getting vaccinated.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

#pertussis #whooping cough #health #respiratory health #respiratory disease #vaccination #cdnpoli #canada #canadian politics #canadian news #canadian #nunavut #iqualuit