HAVING trouble shaking off a nagging cough? Then stay away from babies, as you may be suffering from whooping cough, which can kill newborns.
In most industrialised countries, whooping cough is almost a thing of the past thanks to vaccination. But now it鈥檚 making a comeback. Between 1995 and 1999, there was a fivefold increase in the number of cases in young babies in Finland, for example, even though almost all children are vaccinated. This has happened because neither the disease itself, nor the vaccine, confers lifelong immunity.
As a result more adults now carry the disease. It is harder to spot whooping cough in adults, and experts meeting in Milan last week reported that 10 per cent or more of European adults with a cough lasting weeks have the disease. 鈥淭his could be a hidden reservoir of infection,鈥� says Marc Struelens of Erasmus Hospital in Brussels.
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Another problem, says Frits Mooi of the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, the Netherlands, is that there are new strains around that vaccines can鈥檛 fully protect against. Vaccination itself encouraged these new strains to evolve.
Children who are already immunised can be infected by the new strains, and they also infect adults more easily. People may not realise they have it, and so may unwittingly pass it on to babies.
Vaccine companies have introduced a new vaccine based on proteins isolated from the whooping cough bacterium. These vaccines are based on proteins from the old strains that are different in the new ones, so even the latest vaccines will be ineffective against the new strains. The companies have no plans to develop any vaccines based on the new strains.