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The Cough That Outcried the ER: Why Whooping Cough Still Haunts Us
A firsthand account of pertussis, the dangers of vaccine misinformation, and why prevention still matters more than ever.
I remember walking into the emergency department and hearing a child with whooping cough (aka pertussis) coughing horribly. Whooping cough is a bacterial infection caused by Bordetella pertussis. More on the bacteria and why it’s so bad in a second. Let me tell you about this poor kid.
The family was in a single room, with the door closed. We could still hear the child cough. Just as the little one seemed to be catching their breath, they were met with another paroxysm of cough. The emergency room physician had ordered a chest x-ray, but he knew it would be hard to get a good picture with the child moving and coughing so much.
Then again, according to the physician, no X-ray was really needed to determine what was going on. He knew the sound of the cough. And he knew the child was not vaccinated.
This was the early 2000s, and parents had just been scared off vaccines by the Wakefield fraud surrounding the measles vaccine. Other frauds were floating around about vaccines, like the one about thimerosal also causing autism. Or the one about the DTaP…
