This article was posted on Fox 8 Live. Read more here.
Two infants in Louisiana have died in the past six months from a respiratory illness that doctors say is preventable. The head physician at Manning Family Children’s Hospital warns that more deaths could follow if parents don’t take the disease seriously.
At first, the infection may seem like a common cold, but it can quickly turn deadly.
“The serious phase of the disease occurs when fits of coughing happen and with those a child can have oxygen levels dip in the blood, there can be seizures, damage to the brain and even death in rare cases,” said Mark Kline, M.D., the Physician-in-Chief at Manning Family Children’s.
Kline is talking about whooping cough, also known as pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial infection spread through respiratory droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes. Babies under one year old are at the greatest risk for severe complications.
“In 2024, we saw 471 cases which was a record for recent years,” said Kristina Bryant, M.D., the hospital epidemiologist at Norton Children’s Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.
“We have certainly had children who have been hospitalized for pertussis in the last year,” Bryant added.
Bryant, who serves on the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases, expects cases to continue rising.
“We are going to see more cases of whooping cough. CDC has been saying for a number of months now that we’re going to see more cases in both vaccinated children and unvaccinated children,” she said.
Health experts agree the best way to prevent whooping cough is through vaccination. But it’s not a one-time shot.
“It’s given to young infants at two, four and six months of age and then to toddlers at about 18 months of age, and then just before a child starts school, typically at four or five years of age,” Kline said.
That’s the primary series of vaccinations called the DTaP. Then, the Dtap is recommended for kids around age 10 or 11 as well as pregnant women and other adults who haven’t gotten it. But Kline says the recommendation isn’t always followed.
“All of the children we have seen over the past year with whooping cough have been unvaccinated,” Kline commented.
According to Kline, doctors treated 10 kids at Children’s in the past six months for whooping cough, and some of them ended up in the ICU.
“Almost all of the children who suffer serious complications from whooping cough either are unvaccinated or under vaccinated, they have not completed that primary series of vaccinations,” Kline explained.
Looking at state health department data, the percentage of kindergartners in Louisiana who started the school year in 2021 receiving the DTaP vaccine was 91.32 percent.
The DTaP vaccine includes pertussis, diphtheria and tetanus. By 2023, the number dropped to 90.45 percent. The state health department says two infants died in Louisiana in the last six months. Before that, the previous death from whooping cough in the state was in 2018.
“We thought we were on pace to eliminate diseases like whooping cough,” Kline commented.
Last week, Louisiana’s Surgeon General, Ralph Abraham, sent a letter to local health departments informing them that the state will no longer promote mass vaccinations.
In New Orleans, health director Jennifer Avegno, M.D., pushes back.
“We do not have to follow this, and we will not be following this. We will continue to promote vaccinations of all kinds,” Avegno said.