Whooping Cough
Posted by Nathaniel.
So, we picked a pediatrician yesterday. He’s actually our neighbor, the same one whose tree fell on Kirsten’s car in the fall. He’s extremely highly recommended too and his office is close to the house, so he should be a good person to deal with.
Anyway, I learned two interesting things.
1. Adults should get immunized again for whooping cough. Getting it just causes cold-like coughing in adults, but adults are the main reservoir for the disease in the human population. It’s all included in the tetanus booster these days.
2. With all the drama about possible connections between vaccines and Autism, he’s very pro vaccination. In his words, “I’ve been practicing medicine long enough to have seen some of the diseases we immunize against.” Some really horrible stories… like one 6-week old that he helped treat when he was an intern who had whooping cough. The kid would have attacks of coughing so bad that it would go into respiratory arrest and have to be resuscitated on a daily basis. And this went on for weeks.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:28 pm Using
heh, i wonder if my 3 month hacking cough was actually whooping cough my first year at dartmouth. i nearly passed out sometimes.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:32 pm Using
It could be, it’s a pretty normal thing for adults to get and the doctor did say that they ask if any parents or caregivers have had “a severe cough” when babies come down with it.
May 7th, 2008 at 2:09 pm Using
is there anything they can do for it besides riding out the symptoms? i can’t remember if it’s a virus or bacteria. i had gone to the health center, and they had said it was just post-nasal drip irritating my throat, there was nothing to be done.
i know it’s also related to kennel cough in dogs. same family (genus?) of microbe.
that’s cool that the doc’s close. and that he’s not being weird about immunizations. how long til the little one arrives?
May 7th, 2008 at 2:23 pm Using
I just looked and it’s apparently a bacterial thing, so antibiotics might have helped. Of course, it could have been something else as well.
There was just a news story this morning about how parents failing to immunize their kids has resulted in measles outbreaks in some of the more granola areas of northern California. It’s only a matter of time until the outbreaks get up some steam and kids start dying. That’s the reason the vaccines exist in the first place.
Anyway, we’re down to 4-5 weeks at this point. It’s coming really really soon.
May 8th, 2008 at 4:14 pm Using
I had a two-month cough last spring. Then this year the same thing happened again. This time it lasted for about 5 weeks so I guess it’s an improvement…. The cough was never that bad, but just won’t go away. It seems it could be whooping cough.
btw, the Chinese name for whooping cough literally means “one-hundred-day cough”….