Whooping Cough Poses New Threat

Whooping cough is making a comeback 40 years after most industrialized countries started vaccinating children, and the culprit seems to be weakening effects of the shot, researchers said Saturday.

Known also as pertussis, the highly infectious ailment can kill infants and cause a lingering but hard-to-diagnose cough in teenagers and adults, the experts told an American Society for Microbiology meeting.

They recommended that countries organize programs to provide booster shots to teens and said doctors needed to keep an eye out for the infection when patients showed up with coughs.

“Pertussis is a disease that won’t go away,” said Dr. David Hooper of Boston. “We have a vaccine for it, but the problem with the vaccine is that immunity wanes after five years. Hospitals and emergency rooms are dealing with outbreaks that are very hard to deal with,” Hooper said during a news conference.

Two years ago, 8,296 cases of pertussis were reported in the United States, government data show, with incidents steadily increasing since the 1980s.