CHILDREN’S HEALTH: WHOOPING COUGH
Symptoms: runny nose; low-grade fever; severe, strangling (“whooping”) cough followed by vomiting of mucus.
Home care:
Make sure your child is adequately immunized against whooping cough.
Isolate the child from other young children.
If the vomiting is severe, feed the child small meals several times a day.
Precautions
- Whooping cough is often fatal in infants. All infants should be immunized against this disease.
- A child who has been exposed to whooping cough should see a doctor.
- A mild cough may indicate mild whooping cough, which the child can spread to others.
- Any cough that is getting progressively worse after two weeks should be brought to the attention of your doctor.
- Whooping cough is highly contagious and the infected child should be kept away from other people.
- Whooping cough can be caused by several germs, and the disease caused by one type does not give immunity against the others.
Whooping cough is a highly contagious infection of the respiratory tract, usually caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis, but sometimes by Bordetella parapertussis or Bordetella bronchiseptica. Whooping cough caused by one organism does not provide immunity against whooping cough caused by other germs, and the vaccine that’s available provides immunity only against infection from the most common organism, Bordetella pertussis. The incubation period – the time it takes for symptoms to develop once the child has been exposed to the disease – is seven to 14 days. Whooping cough can be serious in infants under one year, and as many as 50 percent of these infants die. Newborns are not immune.
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