Whooping Cough On The Rise In RI: What To Know About Pertussis

RHODE ISLAND — The United States is seeing a rise in the number of whooping cough cases. Nationally, in 2024, cases are nearly five times higher than the previous year.

In Rhode Island, there have been 35 cases so far in 2024, compared with zero this time in 2023. Cases in New England increased to 535, compared to 47 this time last year, according to the latest surveillance data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nationally, there have been 14,569 cases of whooping cough in 2024, compared to 3,475 last year. The totals include 291 new cases reported for the week ending Sept. 14.

The bacterial illness owes its common name to the high-pitched “whoop” sound people, especially babies, make when they try to breathe during a violent coughing fit. Anyone can develop whooping cough, but the disease is especially dangerous for young children and can lead to serious complications, including pneumonia, brain damage, seizures, apnea and death.

People who are infected with the bacteria that causes pertussis can spread it for weeks, often without realizing they are sick. Good hygiene practices, such as thorough hand-washing, are encouraged, but vaccines are the best protection against pertussis, according to the CDC.

Babies born in the United States routinely get the DTaP vaccine, which protects against whooping cough and two other diseases, diphtheria and tetanus. The vaccine works well to protect children against the latter two, but is less effective over time at preventing whooping cough. Boosters are recommended every 10 years or so.

Dr. Tina Tan, president-elect of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told NBC News that vaccine hesitancy seems to be driving the increase in whooping cough cases to pre-pandemic levels.

“We’ve been seeing increasing amounts of disease occurring in adolescents and the adult population because they’re not getting vaccinated like they should,” Tan said.

Also, social distancing practices that were common during the pandemic have fallen by the wayside, according to Dr. Thomas Nurray, a Yale Medicine pediatric infectious disease specialist.

“Levels of pertussis dropped dramatically when we were all masking, and now this huge increase is getting us back to pre-pandemic levels, and probably a little above that,” Murray said in a news release. “It’s a contagious respiratory virus that can spread fairly quickly through the population.”

A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee met Friday to discuss the need for a longer lasting and more effective pertussis vaccine. But until that happens, boosters are the best defense against the bacterial illness.

Infectious disease experts think whooping cough is probably more widespread in the United States than the CDC surveillance numbers suggest.

“For every case of whooping cough we find, there’s probably 10 of them out there that didn’t come to medical attention,” Dr. Jim Conway, a pediatrician and infectious disease expert at UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, told NBC.

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