Whooping cough cases approach near record numbers
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Holiday cheer is in the air, and so are infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whooping cough cases in the United States are beginning to return to pre-pandemic levels.
According to Dr. Jason Newland, chief of infectious diseases at Nationwide Children's Hospital, there are over 32,000 recorded cases this year alone in the U.S., which is six times greater than last year.
The most up-to-date data from the CDC, which was released in early November, showed Pennsylvania and New York had reported the most cases of whooping cough at more than 2,000 each. Ohio, Wisconsin, Washington, and California all have more than 1,000 cases reported so far.
Dr. Newland said whooping cough, sometimes referred to as pertussis, often presents similar symptoms as the common cold. This can include fever, runny nose, and eventually an aggressive cough.
'The difference is the cough can come in paroxysms, but the better word for it is just a lot at one time, to where we hear that we say 'whoop' because you cough, cough, cough, cough, cough and then you go whoop because you've got to breathe,' he said.
Dr. Newland said the whooping cough vaccine is the best way to prevent the infection, starting at two months old.
'And then because the vaccine is not perfect, meaning it doesn't provide me protection the rest of my life, you really need to get it every ten years,' Dr. Newland said. He noted, however, that fewer people are getting vaccinated.
Experts believe the 2024 surge in cases may be in part because of missed vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Widespread masking in 2020 and 2021 also helped prevent spreading of the bacteria that causes pertussis. Now, the disease is back with a vengeance, and we're seeing more cases than we did in 2019.
Eye drops recalled nationwide due to fungal contamination
'You and I, we get pertussis, we're going to cough, and we're going to cough a lot, and we might cough 100 days, and we might cough so much we break a rib, or we cough so much that we want to vomit, all terrible things, which is why I want my vaccine,' Dr. Newland said. The linger cough associated with pertussis has also earned it another name: the 100-day cough.
Infants are the most susceptible to catching the illness.
'They can come to the hospital not breathing,' Dr. Newland said. 'They can have neurologic conditions making them seize and they can die.'
If you have any other holiday gatherings this year, he recommends taking proper precautions.
'You can always wear a mask to prevent things like pertussis, things like RSV, things like influenza,' Dr. Newland said. 'Influenza's rip-roaring right now.'
He advised those seeking to shield themselves from pertussis to wash their hands frequently, and maintain distance from those who are infected.
'We learned these things during the pandemic. We can keep doing that to protect us against pertussis and all of these respiratory illnesses.'
The treatment for whooping cough is simple, with many people able to recover with the help of antibiotics. Experts are, however, concerned about the illness because it's an airborne disease, making it highly contagious.
'If we all get vaccinated [before we are] going to be around the youngest and most vulnerable, we help protect them even more,' Dr. Newland said. 'So, having 30,000 cases is scary because you know there's some infants in that and you're putting others at risk.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Owensboro women's recovery facility sees rare availability
OWENSBORO, Ky. (WEHT) — A recovery program in Owensboro says they have more than half of their women's facility available right now. Staff at Friends of Sinners say the vacancies are something they've never seen say when it comes to substance abuse recovery waiting lists are the norm. Owensboro's Friends of Sinners women's recovery program staff say for the first time since they can remember their waiting list and two-thirds of their facility's client spots are empty and have remained that way since the beginning of June.'If one person goes or completes [the program], we're able to fill that bed immediately. So, the fact that we have seven open is a very rare occasion. After COVID, the overdose deaths [were] hitting over 100,000 in the United States. I believe that those numbers have dropped a little bit, but my goodness, we still see it everywhere,' says Jordan Wilson How would phasing out FEMA impact Kentucky? Statistics show a 30 percent decrease in Kentucky overdose deaths from 2023 to 2024, dropping to a little over 1,400 annually. Wilson says the recent decline highlights that investments in recovery efforts are working, but says the work is far from over. Whether it be opioids, methamphetamine or alcohol addiction, Wilson says its hard to find someone unaffected by the epidemic. Angel Harper, a current client, says she knows firsthand.'I lost everything. I lost my family. I almost lost my life. I got narcaned 16 times in 30 days…that's 16 times I died in 30 days. I just realized that, I had to try something different. It's scary when you're like that, and there is no way out,' says Angel Harper, a client at FOS. Harper traveled all the way from Georgia hoping for a second chance and is a little over a month into the year-long program. After a month of being enrolled, clients work to get a job, learn life skills like budgeting and pay a little over $100 each week for rent. Being admitted requires a 3-step process. Requirements include writing a letter explaining why you feel God wants you to come to the program, answering application questions and scheduling an interview with staff who were once in their shoes years prior. 'My son said to me, 'mom, give God a year, and see where you're at. You dedicated a lot of your life to doing drugs. Give him a year.' That's what I did, and that's the advice that I give to these girls,' says Elizabeth Cockrell, a staff member at the facility and FOS alumna. Cockrell is three and a half years into her sobriety journey and says she tries to serve as what she needed when she walked through the front door of the center. She says she pushes for the ladies to understand that God makes all the difference. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
RFK Jr. Is Barely Even Pretending Anymore
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accepted his new position as health secretary, he made a big show of distancing himself from his past life. 'News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry,' Kennedy, who has for decades promoted the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism and has baselessly sown doubt over the ability of the U.S. government to vet shots, said at his confirmation hearing in January. 'I am neither. I am pro-safety.' But for all Kennedy's talk, this week, he did exactly what a person would do if they were trying to undermine the scientific consensus on vaccination in the United States. He abruptly dismissed the entire expert committee that advises the CDC on its nationwide vaccine recommendations—and began to fill the roster with like-minded people ready to cast doubt on the benefits of vaccination. Like Kennedy, few of these new appointees to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice, or ACIP, have openly embraced the notion that they are anti-vaccine. But among them are individuals who have spoken out against COVID vaccines and policies, claimed vaccine injuries for their own children, and falsely linked COVID shots to deaths—or even baselessly accused those vaccines of 'causing a form of acquired immunity deficiency syndrome.' In January, I wrote that remaking the committee in exactly this way would be an especially harmful blow to Americans' health: Perhaps more than any other body of experts in the U.S., ACIP guides the nation's future preparedness against infectious disease. By appointing a committee that is poised to legitimize more of his own radical views, Kennedy is giving his skewed version of scientific reality the government's imprimatur. Whether he will admit to it or not, he is serving the most core goal of the anti-vaccine movement—eroding access to, and trust in, immunization. In an emailed statement, Health and Human Services Press Secretary Emily G. Hilliard reiterated that 'Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine—he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability,' and added that his 'evidence-based approach puts accountability and radical transparency first, which will restore trust in our public health system.' (Kennedy, notably, promised Senator Bill Cassidy during his confirmation process that he would maintain ACIP, as Cassidy put it, 'without changes.') Since the 1960s, ACIP has lent government policy on vaccines the clout of scientific evidence. Its mandate is to convene experts across fields such as infectious disease, immunology, pediatrics, vaccinology, and public health to carefully vet the data on immunizations, weigh their risks and benefits, and vote on recommendations that guide the public on how to use them—who should get vaccines, and when. Those guidelines are then passed to the CDC director, who—with only the rarest of exceptions—accepts that advice wholesale. 'These recommendations are what states look to, what providers look to,' Rupali Limaye, an expert in vaccine behavior at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. Medicare, for instance, is required to fully cover the vaccines that ACIP recommends; ACIP also determines which vaccines are covered by the Vaccines for Children Program, which provides free vaccines for children whose families cannot afford them. The experts who serve on ACIP have the opportunity, more than just about any of their scientific peers, to translate their vaccine rhetoric into reality. So far, Kennedy has dismissed the 17 people who were serving on ACIP, and filled eight of the newly open slots. Most of the new nominees have an obvious bone to pick with at least some vaccines, especially COVID shots, and have publicly advocated for limiting their use. Among the new members, for instance, is Robert Malone, a controversial physician who has spoken at anti-vaccine events, where he has denounced COVID vaccines and, without evidence, suggested that they can worsen coronavirus infections. Another appointee is Vicky Pebsworth, who serves on the board of the National Vaccine Information Center, an anti-vaccine nonprofit previously known as Dissatisfied Parents Together. A third, Retsef Levi, a health-care-management expert, called for the administration of COVID vaccines to be halted in 2023, and has questioned the shots' safety, despite a large body of evidence from clinical trials supporting their continued use. Overall, 'this is not a list that would increase confidence in vaccine decisions,' Dorit Reiss, a vaccine-policy expert at UC San Francisco, told me. (None of these new ACIP members returned a request for comment.) The next ACIP meeting is scheduled for the end of this month—and the agenda includes discussion about anthrax vaccines, chikungunya vaccines, COVID-19 vaccines, cytomegalovirus vaccine, the human-papillomavirus vaccine, influenza vaccines, the Lyme-disease vaccine, meningococcal vaccines, pneumococcal vaccines, and RSV vaccines. That's a big slate of topics for a brand-new panel of members, Paul Offit, a pediatrician and a vaccine expert who has previously served on ACIP, told me: Depending on how the meeting is structured, and on the input from CDC scientists, these new committee members could substantially alter the guidelines on several immunizations—perhaps so much so that certain shots could stop being recommended to certain groups of Americans. Based on the composition of the committee so far, Offit predicts that the new ACIP will eventually push the CDC away from full-throated endorsement of many of these vaccines. Even subtle changes in the wording of CDC recommendations—a should swapped for a may—can have big ripple effects, Limaye told me. Insurers, for instance, may be more reluctant to cover vaccines that are not actively endorsed by the CDC; some states—especially those in which vaccines have become a political battleground—may stop mandating those types of shots. If the CDC softens its recommendations, 'we will likely see more partisan divides' in who opts for protection nationwide, Jason Schwartz, a vaccine-policy expert at Yale, told me. Pharmaceutical companies may, in turn, cut down production of vaccines that don't have full CDC backing, perpetuating a cycle of reduced availability and reduced enthusiasm. And primary-care physicians, who look to the CDC's vaccination schedule as an essential reference, may shift the language they use to describe childhood shots, nudging more parents to simply opt out. Historically, medical and public-health associations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, have aligned their vaccine recommendations with ACIP's—because those recommendations were all driven by scientific evidence. Now, though, scientific consensus and government position are beginning to diverge: Multiple groups of physicians, scientists, and public-health scholars have issued statements condemning the vaccine decisions of Kennedy and his allies; a number of prominent scientists have now banded together to form a kind of alt-ACIP, dubbing themselves the Vaccine Integrity Project. As the views of fringe vaccine groups become the government's stance, Americans may soon have to choose between following the science and following what their nation's leaders say. Identifying as 'anti-vaccine' has historically been taboo: In a nation where most people remain largely in favor of shots, the term is pejorative, an open acknowledgment that one's views lie outside of the norm. But the more vaccine resistance infiltrates HHS and its advisers, the more what's considered normal may shift toward Kennedy's own views on vaccines; ACIP's reputation for evidence-backed thinking could even gild those views with scientific legitimacy. Assembling one's own team of friendly experts is an especially effective way to sanewash extremism, Reiss told me, and to overturn the system through what appear to be normal channels. If the nation's most prominent group of vaccine advisers bends toward anti-vaccine, the term loses its extremist edge—and the scientists who argue, based on sound data, that vaccines are safe and effective risk being labeled anti-government. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Overdose deaths decrease nationwide, and here in the Upstate
SPARTANBURG COUNTY, S.C. (WSPA) – According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), overdose deaths have decreased nationwide by almost 27% in the past year, and are projected to reach their lowest level since 2019. 'You realize you have a problem, you know true leadership is dealing with the problem and then putting the plan in place, and I believe that's probably what's happening nationwide,' said Spartanburg Co. coroner Rusty Clevenger. Clevenger's data showed overdose deaths in Spartanburg Co. skyrocketed during Covid. He said it was then that he and state officials knew they not only needed to track the deaths, but exactly where these drugs were coming from and which ones were the cause. 'We had to figure out where the hotspots were at so we could put you know, measures in place to try, whether it be education or whatever, and it seems to be working as well,' he said. Data showed Spartanburg County saw a marked decrease in overdose deaths in 2024. 'The numbers are holding steady about last year's levels, maybe a little bit less right now,' Clevenger explained. However Keith Blanton, the Pastor and Superintendent at Faith Home, a non-profit Christian recovery center, said beds in their facilities across the Upstate stay full. He told us between their four locations, there are 135 beds. 'I think more people are getting help,' said Blanton. 'I just do. I think that you know, Narcan is a good thing. It saves people's lives and as long as they're alive, you know there's a chance.' Blanton said thanks to the coroner's office and law enforcement agencies tracking 'hotspots' and providing education, drugs no longer have to be the end of every user's story. 'It's tough,' Blanton said. 'It's tough at first especially, but it gets easier, and it gets better. But if I had one thing to say, you do not have to live that way, there's a way out if you want out.' Blanton told 7NEWS over the years that the people they serve have become significantly younger. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
