Whooping Cough Vaccination

     There is an increasing trend for parents to decide not to give recommended childhood vaccinations or to give them on an altered schedule. There are many reasons given: the baby is too young to get so many shots; the diseases aren’t around anymore; there are dangerous things given in the vaccines; the medical community overstates the risks; the medical and pharmaceutical communities are in collaboration with the big drug companies and are only after the money.

     Even though the numbers of reported diseases that are preventable by vaccine are rising, doctors have been reluctant to blame the lack of vaccination on that increase. In an effort not to blame the lack of vaccination, researchers have said that the increase in these diseases is possibly due to such things as the diseases being easier to diagnose, the immunity from vaccinations wearing off and the diseases themselves changing.

     A study done at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and reported in a recent issue of Pediatrics looked directly at whether parents’ refusal to give their children vaccinations was related to their children getting pertussis – whooping cough. Whooping cough used to be a catastrophic disease that could come into a town and wipe out a large population of the adults and children. A vaccine for it was developed in 1947 and whooping cough faded into history as “one of those diseases children used to get”. However, whooping cough is now one of the diseases that has been coming back in outbreaks all around the country.

     The study reported in Pediatrics is a very complex and sophisticated study that eliminated all other variables and looked whooping cough outbreaks in California in 2010. Between 2000 and 2010, the rate of parents choosing not to vaccinate their children doubled in California. In some school districts, 84% of the children weren’t vaccinated. The study clearly showed the 2010 outbreaks of whooping cough were due to lack of vaccination. This lack of vaccination was not due to parent’s inability to pay for the vaccines or lack of information – the children who were not vaccinated were from families with upper socioeconomic status and higher education level. These children got whooping cough because their parents chose not to give the vaccine.

     Whooping cough, measles, polio, and diphtheria still exist. The sad fact is that during those 2010 California outbreaks of pertussis, ten of the children died from it. Whether the parents were following a “natural medicine” fad or they just thought they were smarter than decades of dedicated medical research, the fact remains that they watched their child die from a preventable disease. When parents refuse vaccinations or decide to “wait until the child is older”, those parents need to understand that they have chosen not to protect their child from a dangerous disease and they must be willing to accept the consequences.