Like measles and mumps, pertussis, or whooping cough, is another vaccine-preventable disease that has been increasing in recent years.
Pre-Vaccine Era Pertussis Outbreaks
Pertussis has been known since at least the Middle Ages, although the bacteria that causes pertussis, Bordetella pertussis, wasn’t discovered until 1906.
That discovery led to the later development of the first pertussis vaccines, but before then, pertussis was a big killer, with epidemic cycles every 2 to 5 years.
During one of these cycles in the United States, from 1926 to 1930, there were:
- 909,705 cases, and
- 36,013 deaths
Unfortunately, even natural infection doesn’t provide life-long immunity, so adults would get pertussis and give it to susceptible kids, who were most likely to die during these epidemics.
But even in non-epidemic years, a lot of folks got pertussis. The number of reported cases ranged from “just” 161,799 in 1928 to 202,210 in 1926. And during one of the biggest years, 1934, there were 265,269 cases!
Post-Vaccine Era Pertussis Outbreaks
That changed in the vaccine era.
The first pertussis vaccines were developed in the 1930s and became more widely used in the 1940s when it was combined into the whole-cell DTP vaccine.
This was replaced with the acellular DTaP vaccine in 1997, with the Tdap vaccine being added to the vaccine schedule in 2006.
These vaccines helped to greatly reduce how many people got pertussis and how many people died from pertussis:
- 1940 – 183,866 cases
- 1950 – 120,718 cases and 1, 118 deaths
- 1960 – 14,809 cases and 118 deaths
- 1970 – 4,249 cases and 12 deaths
- 1980 – 1,730 cases and 11 deaths
- 1990 – 4,570 cases and 12 deaths
- 2000 – 7,867 cases and 12 deaths
- 2010 – 27,550 cases and 26 deaths
They never eradicated pertussis though, and as you can see, recently, pertussis cases have started to rise again.
In 2012, there were 48,277 cases of pertussis in the United States, the most since 1950, when we had 68,687 cases. Unfortunately, with the rise in cases, we are also seeing the tragic consequences of this disease – 20 deaths in 2012, mostly infants under age 3 months.
Pertussis cases remained steady, but high, in 2013 and 2014, at around 30,000 cases in the United States.
In California, pertussis reached epidemic levels. The California Department of Public Health reported at least 11,114 cases in 2014 – the highest numbers of pertussis cases in the state in 70 years!
And as expected with the rise in cases, there were 3 pertussis related deaths in California that year – all infants who had contracted pertussis when they were less than 8 weeks old. Two of the infants became sick in 2013, but the third, a 5-week-old baby, got infected in 2014.
Another baby, only 25 days old died in early 2015, but will be counted as the 2nd death of 2014 since that is when the illness started. About 383 patients, mostly infants who are less than 4 months old, were hospitalized in California that year, including 80 who required intensive care. And according to the California Department of Public Health, about 82% of the cases in infants were born to mothers who did not receive a dose of Tdap during their third trimester of pregnancy.
What’s happened since then?
Pertussis cases began to fall! In fact, with just under 18,000 cases in the United States, 2016 may have ended with the lowest number of pertussis cases since 2008.
Still, with just 1,830 pertussis cases in California in 2016, there were two deaths – both infants who were younger than 3 months of age when they got sick. And there was at least one death in 2017, with similar rates of disease, although reports are still preliminary. There was also a bump up in the pertussis case counts in 2017, to just under 19,000 cases.
The preliminary numbers for 2018 look better though – about 13,439 cases nationwide.
Why So Many Pertussis Outbreaks?
Ever since a 2010 California pertussis outbreak, in which there were 9,154 cases of pertussis, the most in 63 years, and 10 infants died, many people, especially parents, began wondering why we were seeing more pertussis these days.
Is it because the pertussis vaccines simply don’t work, as the anti-vaccine movement would have you think?
Or is it because there are higher rates of unvaccinated kids these days and parents using alternative immunization schedules, instead of the standard immunization schedule from the CDC?
A commentary, Why Do Pertussis Vaccines Fail?, by James Cherry, MD, gave us some answers.
While the title of the article might have you think that all of the blame lies with the pertussis vaccines, that certainly isn’t the case. While there can be vaccine failures with the pertussis vaccines, just like any other vaccine, that doesn’t mean that the vaccine doesn’t work for most children.
One of the problems is that the DTaP vaccine likely isn’t as effective as the older DTP vaccine. So instead of efficacy of 84 to 85%, as was once believed, it is likely closer to just 71 to 78%.
Other issues, including waning immunity, the possibility of an incorrect balance of antigens in the vaccine that could create a blocking effect, and genetic changes in the B. pertussis bacteria, could also possibly lead to increased vaccine failure rates.
So it isn’t that the pertussis vaccines don’t work.
That should be easy to see when you look at the pertussis rates in California, when the highest rates by far were in infants less than 6 months of age (434 per 100,000 people). In contrast, children who were 6 months to 6 years old had a rate of only 62 per 100,000.
And the results of a study that were presented at the 49th annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in Boston show just how important the pertussis vaccine is, as:
- vaccine effectiveness was 98.1 percent among children who received their 5th dose within the past year
- long term effectiveness – children who were five or more years past their last DTaP dose – was about 71 percent
- children who had never received any doses of DTaP (unvaccinated children) faced odds of having whooping cough at least eight times higher than children who received all five doses
It is also important to note that the high rates seen in 2010 in California are still well below the rates that were seen in the pre-vaccination era, when the attack rate of pertussis in the United States was as high as 157 per 100,000 people, with about 200,000 cases a year.
What’s the answer?
“The present “resurgence of pertussis” is mainly due to greater awareness and the use of PCR for diagnosis. There are also many other factors which have contributed to the “resurgence.” New vaccines are clearly needed; with our present vaccines (DTaP and adolescent and adult formulated tetanus and diphtheria toxoids and acellular pertussis vaccine (Tdap)), if used correctly, severe pertussis and deaths in infants can be prevented.”
James D. Cherry, MD on The History of Pertussis (Whooping Cough); 1906 – 2015: Facts, Myths, and Misconceptions
It certainly isn’t for more kids to follow non-standard, parent-selected, delayed protection vaccine schedules or to simply skip vaccines all together. Since natural immunity isn’t going to keep newborns and infants from getting pertussis, the ages which are most at risk for life-threatening infections, they can catch pertussis from people around them, including those working on their natural immunity. Natural infections don’t even provide life-long protection against pertussis, as some people believe. That natural immunity wanes fairly quickly too.
The future of pertussis control is more likely going to be in maximizing our current vaccination program, including getting more teens and adults to get the Tdap vaccine, especially when women are pregnant.
That’s the best strategy, at least until new pertussis vaccines are developed. It provides a lot of benefits. According to the CDC, like with the flu vaccine, when you get a pertussis vaccine, in addition to protecting yourself and those people around you, “people who do catch whooping cough after being vaccinated are much less likely to be hospitalized or die from the disease.”
Unfortunately, not everyone has gotten the message. And because of waning immunity, children who aren’t vaccinated against pertussis can’t “hide in the herd” and rely on the rest of us who do vaccinate our children to provide them with protection. Instead, since they are at a higher risk, they get pertussis and get even more people sick.
In one study, Parental refusal of pertussis vaccination is associated with an increased risk of pertussis infection in children, researchers found that “vaccine refusers had a 23-fold increased risk for pertussis when compared with vaccine acceptors, and 11% of pertussis cases in the entire study population were attributed to vaccine refusal.” The highly contagious nature of pertussis then means every primary case is probably going to infect as many as 17 other people. That’s why it makes sense that higher rates of children using vaccine exemptions could be at least one of the factors in these outbreaks.
In fact, several studies, including, Geographic Clustering of Nonmedical Exemptions to School Immunization Requirements and Associations With Geographic Clustering of Pertussis, found that “geographic pockets of vaccine refusal are associated with the risk of pertussis outbreaks in the whole community.”
Get educated. Vaccines are safe and as you can see with the rise in outbreaks, vaccines are necessary.
What to Know About Pertussis Outbreaks
Many factors are responsible for the rise in pertussis outbreaks in recent years, but it is clear that being unvaccinated and unprotected put you at greatest risk for getting pertussis and passing it on to others.
More on Pertussis Outbreaks
- Study – The Toll of Whooping Cough and Measles
- CDC – Pertussis Outbreak Trends
- CDC – Pertussis Epidemic — California, 2014
- Pertussis – California Department of Public Health – State of California
- Study – Historical review of pertussis and the classical vaccine
- Study – The History of Pertussis (Whooping Cough); 1906–2015: Facts, Myths, and Misconceptions
- Study – Why do pertussis vaccines fail?
- Pertussis vaccine effectiveness and the California Pertussis Outbreak
- Study – Nonmedical Vaccine Exemptions and Pertussis in California, 2010
- Study – Geographic Clustering of Nonmedical Exemptions to School Immunization Requirements and Associations With Geographic Clustering of Pertussis
- Study – Parental refusal of pertussis vaccination is associated with an increased risk of pertussis infection in children.
- Study – Geospatial analysis of nonmedical vaccine exemptions and pertussis outbreaks in the United States
- The horrible consequences of seeking “natural” immunity: Naturopathy and Whooping Cough
- Whooping Cough Photos
- CDC – Whooping Cough: A True Story
- Beyond Anti-Vax: The Pertussis Problem
- Whooping Cough Can Happen to You or Your Baby