Children infected with whooping cough might not develop symptoms for up to three weeks, experts warned today.
Almost 3,000 cases of pertussis, or the 100-day cough, have already been recorded in 2024 — treble the levels seen across the entirety of 2023. Experts fear it’s on track to be the biggest outbreak in 40 years.
The bacteria can silently lurk inside the body for 21 days, meaning infected Brits may be unknowingly transmitting the bug, which is just as contagious as measles.
Officials have already urged pregnant women to get vaccinated against the bacterial infection amid the worrying surge in cases that has killed five newborn babies.
Experts, however, cautioned the jabs’ immunity wear off after 10 years and called on the NHS to consider dishing out boosters to adults, like the US.
Health officials warned that the infection is initially difficult to tell apart from a cold, as the first signs are a runny nose and sore throat. But around a week later, sufferers may develop coughing bouts that last minutes, struggle to breathe after coughing and make a ‘whoop’ sound between coughs. Other signs of whooping cough include bringing up a thick mucus that can cause vomiting and becoming red in the face
Polly Deehy, from Dartford, Kent, was an otherwise healthy baby until her terrifying ordeal. In April, at just two weeks old, she developed a rattly cough that left her struggling to breathe. She was rushed to hospital four days later by her parents when she suddenly turned blue, her mother Kerry Pearson (pictured) revealed
Dr Saleyha Ahsan, a London-based A&E doctor, told BBC Radio 4: ‘Whooping cough is highly contagious and the problem is, people don’t realise they’ve got it, so they’re going around for 21 days and spreading it.
‘Newborn babies are not protected by vaccine, especially in the first two months if their mum hasn’t had the vaccine during pregnancy, so they’re at really, really high risk.’
Whooping cough is caused by the pertussis bacteria and is spread by coughing and sneezing.
Doctors dish out antibiotics as treatment if the whooping cough is detected within three weeks.
However, if a person has been infected for longer, antibiotics will not speed up their recovery, experts say.
Whooping cough is less severe in older children and adults but can still cause sore ribs, a hernias, ear infections and urinary incontinence among these groups.
Officials are desperately trying to ramp up vaccination rates, pleading with mothers-to-be to get jabbed.
Yet, as a few as a quarter of expectant mothers have had the pertussis jab — offered between 16 and 32 weeks — in parts of London.
The jab protects babies in the first few months of their life, when they are most vulnerable and before they can receive their own vaccines.
Newborns are then given three doses of the six-in-one jab at eight, 12 and 16 weeks of age to protect against whooping cough and other serious diseases such as diphtheria and polio.
A pre-school booster is offered after they turn three.
After her condition worsened she was transferred to St Mary’s Hospital in London where medics diagnosed her with pertussis, nicknamed the ‘100-day cough’, and put her on a ventilator
The government has been urged to publicise the deadly danger of whooping cough to boost vaccine uptake, as it did in the 1980s and ’90s
Almost 3,000 cases have already been recorded in 2024 — triple the levels seen across the entirety of 2023. Health chiefs say Covid lockdowns have fuelled England’s unprecedented pertussis epidemic, nicknamed the ‘100-day cough’
But medics today warned the childhood jabs stop working as little as 10 years after vaccination.
Speaking about her own experience after contracting the infection, Dr Ahsan said: ‘I thought I couldn’t get it because I had my vaccine as a child.
‘It was a journey of discovery, I realised that the vaccine you have as a child goes off after about ten years.
‘In the US, they give boosters every ten years, but we don’t do that here.’
She added: ‘There is a lack of knowledge about how deadly and dangerous whooping cough can be.
‘In the 1980s there was lots of coverage about how dangerous whooping cough was.
‘I was a teenager then, and was terrified because I had two little baby sisters, and I used to bug my mum to make sure they had their vaccines because I was terrified by the pictures I was seeing.’
Meanwhile, the Mail on Sunday’s resident GP, Dr Ellie Cannon told Good Morning Britain: ‘People my age in their 40s, they were vaccinated as babies but actually our vaccinations have worn off.
‘So GPs like me see a lot of people in their 30s and 40s and 50s who were vaccinated actually but they’re no longer immune.’
Surveillance statistics show 2,793 lab-confirmed cases have been reported this year to the end of March.
Of these, 556 were logged in January, 918 in February and 1,319 in March.
Half (50.8 per cent) were among those aged 15 and older, with more than a quarter (28.6 per cent) in children aged 10 to 14.
But rates remained highest in babies under three months.
However, infection rates are still nowhere near the annual high of 170,000 logged in the 1940s.
Whooping cough is a cyclical illness which typically peaks every five years. The last occurred in 2016, when almost 6,000 cases were confirmed.
Pre-pandemic, between 2,500 and 4,500 suspected cases were logged each year. This fell to around 500 during the coronavirus crisis.
Lockdowns stifled the spread of pathogens as people met less.
UKHSA bosses said the impact of the Covid pandemic also means there is reduced immunity in the population. Similar rebounds were seen for flu and RSV.
The infection can initially be difficult to tell apart from a cold, with the first signs typically being a runny nose and sore throat.
But around a week later, sufferers may develop coughing bouts which last minutes, struggle to breathe after coughing and make a ‘whoop’ sound between coughs.
Other signs of pertussis include bringing up a thick mucus that can cause vomiting and becoming red in the face.
MailOnline understands of the five babies who have died in 2024 — all under the age of three months — two of their mothers were unvaccinated.
Less than two thirds (59.5 per cent) of expectant mothers in England took the pertussis vaccine, latest figures for 2023 show.
Uptake of the six-in-one jab — offered to babies in their first couple months of life — is also at an all-time low.
Just 91.8 per cent were fully vaccinated by their 1st birthday in 2022/23, according to NHS figures.
Source: Mail Online