

Deadly Whooping Cough, Once Wiped Out, Is Back - cwan
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129198775&ps=cprs

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kmfrk
I just want to highlight this part of the article for people who are about to
close their window without reading it:

>The California epidemic has raised plenty of questions about the role of
vaccination and the increasing numbers of parents who decide not to vaccinate
their children. California’s Department of Public Health cites three schools
in the state where 80 percent of parents have signed a “personal belief
exemption” to keep their children from being vaccinated.

That just blows my mind.

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codyrobbins
I seriously can’t understand how these vaccinations aren’t mandated by law
without exception. The point of vaccination is to protect public health from
devastating communicable diseases, just like the point of fire codes are to
protect the community from fires that could easily spread from building to
building and destroy an entire city. It’s like being able to sign a ‘personal
belief exemption’ saying you don’t believe in fire codes in order to exempt
your house from them. I’m largely a libertarian, but I certainly don’t want my
neighboring houses to all be firetraps.

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Oxryly
I don't thing the metaphor holds up. If you vaccinate your child, why do you
care if other children are vaccinated or not? Your kid is immune...

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codyrobbins
In addition to the point skoob makes, there are also the considerable economic
and societal costs of an epidemic. These costs are borne by the society as a
whole, and therefore the society as a whole has a prerogative to minimize
contagious epidemics.

By your same reasoning, the Holocaust should not matter to you as long as
you’re not a Jew or a homosexual. The point is that mass sickness has an
appreciable effect on you even if you don’t contract the illness yourself.

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Oxryly
boo Godwin.

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dalenkruse
I contracted whooping cough about 5 years ago at the age of 29. I had no idea
what was wrong with me and it took 3 doctors to diagnose it correctly. I can't
totally fault the doctor's diagnosis on the initial visit. When you have
someone come into your office in late October in Minnesota complaining of
coughing and respirator pain, it's probably something pretty common. I was on
several different medications for 5 weeks. I would start to feel better while
on the medication and then get worse when I finished the medication. At no
time did the medication help completely, and my condition worsened at time
went by. I had several chest x-rays and they all came back clean. The third
doctor I visited finally took interest in my case and expanded the tests and
came back with a diagnosis of whooping cough. After I found that out and did
my own research (which include listening to sound clips), I knew it was the
correct diagnosis. I had a 11-month old son at the time and my main concern
was that he would contract it also. Thankfully, that never happened. It took
me about 5 months before I was completely healed. I wouldn't wish that disease
on my worst enemy. Every time you go into a coughing fit, you feel like you
are going to die. I blacked out 3 times from coughing fits. They come up on
you very fast and are very intense and uncontrollable. I also lost my voice
for about 4 weeks. My advice is to get yourself (and your children if you have
any) vaccinated...yesterday!

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ra
I upvoted you for the personal account. I live in Sydney, Australia and our
area currently has a whooping cough outbreak.

I'm only aware of this because we have a 3 month old son. When we were making
out antinatal visits to the hospital there were whooping cough awareness signs
everywhere.

We both had tests, I had the antibody but my girlfriend didn't, so she had the
vaccination.

I had whooping cough when I was very young, so young I don't remember it at
all. But thanks for highlighting your experience.

Beyond the photocopied flyers on the walls in the hospital, I know nothing
about whooping cough (and until just now I didn't even realize it was a
serious illness) and I'm pretty sure the general public doesn't either.

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abstractbill
You can help kill Whooping Cough again. Get a DTAP booster.

Your GP can give it to you, or if you happen to be in San Francisco there's a
clinic at 101 Grove Street that will give you the shot for just $10.

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jurjenh
How did it die in the first place? Is there conclusive evidence that it was
the vaccination and not just due to a cumulative effect of better hygiene,
better diet and better living conditions? And when and how did it resurrect
itself? These questions need to be answered, because if there was an incorrect
assumption in any of the previous answers, the current solution may not be as
good as we'd hope...

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jon_hendry
"And when and how did it resurrect itself?"

Immigration and tourism from countries with less vaccination.

Combined with reduced vaccination in the US.

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joezydeco
Can we rename it "Jenny McCarthy Whooping Cough"?

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jacquesm
If you think that is scary, this is what I think is scary:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/world/asia/12bug.html>

More and more bacteria are finding the route to antibiotic resistance, MRSA is
already quite a problem in some areas causing patients transferred from one
hospital to another to be quarantined on the off chance they might be carrier.

The whooping cough is a serious risk to infants but mortality for adults is
quite low.

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philwelch
I've actually had MRSA. For many cases they just use different antibiotics for
it, combined with physically cleaning the infection site. Mine was small, but
my mom had a much larger infection which simply took more time and effort to
apply similar techniques. (Fun fact: walking into a student health clinic with
a MRSA sore on your arm, walking to the nurse's desk, holding up your arm and
asking "what's this?" will get you seen very promptly!)

Turns out the primary treatment for antibiotic-resistent bacteria is to use
older antibiotics. Bacteria only become resistant to antibiotics that have
recently been used--antibiotics that have fallen out of use, there's no
evolutionary pressure for bacteria to remain resistant to, so within a number
of generations of not encountering that antibiotic, bacteria are suddenly
vulnerable to it.

The medium term solution is to have between 4 and 6 generations of
antibiotics, so hopefully we can just cycle around them as the bacteria catch
up. Antibiotic resistance is nothing new, it's just another problem to be
solved. NDM-1 may or may not be a major curveball. Personally, until I know
for sure, I'll leave the worrying up to the people whose job it is to worry
about such things and try to avoid going to India for any elective surgeries
anytime soon.

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julius_geezer
Never heard of a booster for this. Will ask at my next physical.

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c1sc0
Everyone should be vaccinated against stupidity, a.k.a. that thing called
education.

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tmcw
Sigh. Whooping cough back because everyone's afraid of the non-threat of
vaccines. Bed bugs back because everyone's afraid of DDT.

Uninformed wusses are killing us all.

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tptacek
I avidly read this as another antivax story, but it doesn't seem to be one;
rather, the issue here is that adults need to get DTAP boosters. Who knew? Not
me.

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_delirium
Apparently that's new: in the US at least, Tdap was only approved in 2005, and
replaced Td (the previous standard bundled tetanus/diptheria every-10-years
booster) in most recommendations/clinics around 2006-2007. So adults who
haven't had a tetanus booster in the past 3-4 years didn't get the one that
includes whooping cough, and probably don't even know about the change (I got
my last booster in 2003, and didn't know that it was different now).

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mechanical_fish
... And now I understand why my doctor gave me a tetanus booster last month
without even asking if I had had one in the last ten years. (I think I have,
but I'm not sure, and I never turn down free tetanus boosters if the doctor
offers one.)

