Three days ago the CDC had announced that six infants have died due to whooping cough in California and it seems that the state is now under the grip of the whooping cough epidemic. At that time, CDC had said that South Carolina is the only other state where whooping cough cases have exceeded the "epidemic threshold" so far.
The health officials today announced that nearly 1,500 Californians have been diagnosed with whooping cough this year, five times more than the normal level. The California health officials have already issued an official epidemic of pertussis, the medical term for whooping cough. The state government has also started a vaccination campaign for teens and adults of all ages in order to prevent the spread of the epidemic.
"Teens and adults should be vaccinated, especially anyone who is going to have contact with infants who are too young for vaccinations," CDC epidemiologist Stacey Martin, MSc, tells WebMD. "Those California deaths were all in infants less than 3 months old. They don't have the benefit of vaccination yet, so we have to vaccinate around them," he added. Notably, the vaccine for pertussis does not give a person lifelong immunity to whooping cough. It has been observed that the outbreaks tend to occur in five-year cycles.
The CDC noted that whooping cough, which is a contagious disease, have been increasing since the 1980s, partly because of better diagnostic tests. Pertussis is a bacterial infection and it is one of the diseases covered by the three-way DTaP (diphtheria/tetanus/acellular pertussis) vaccine.
