whooping cough in the news (today)

[smudgley]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5071703/Cases-of-forgotten-diseases-whooping-cough-and-scarlet-fever-on-the-rise.html

[Moli]

Seems all the old diseases are coming back, have not heard of whooping cough since I was a kid...

[dandysmom]

Very interesting, Smudgley! Sounds as if your instincts were right. Scarlet fever is an awful disease, my Mum's younger sister died of it in the early 1900s.......

[angieh]

I had whooping cough as a child. Went into hospital with suspected polio and came out with whooping cough.

[dinahsmum]

Do you think we are all getting a bit complacent and thinking - No need to vaccinate; that disease isn't around any more?
I had whooping cough when I wa svery little. I don't think I can remember it - possibly coughing till I was sick but maybe I just 'remember' that because I was told of it?

[angieh]

I think we as a society need to remember that viruses are far more robust that we are. They will never be gone completely.

[dandysmom]

That's true. Polio is still around in some countries. But isn't smallpox completely eradicated now?

[angieh]

Yes, statistically it is! I found an interesting website that gave a warning, saying:

"WARNING! EXTRAPOLATED STATISTICS ONLY! Not based on data sources from individual countries."

I always thought statistics were tricky things!!!

[MrsH]

I had my children in the 70s when it was "fashionable" not to vaccinate against whooping cough. One night I was baby-sitting for neighbours whose little boy was coughing quite a lot. When the parents came back and we talked about the coughing, they thought he might have caught whooping cough from his cousin. Yep, he had!

The result was that I too caught it and passed it to my two, aged 2 and a half and 10 months old. Not a nice experience, three of us coughing, going blue in the face and getting no sleep. Apparently it was just about the only thing I didn't get as a child!

[dandysmom]

I had measles, chicken pox and German measles, escaped mumps and whooping cough. Only vaccination we had back then was smallpox.

[yola]

Never had whooping cough - it's something that has always had a terror for me, maybe because I was very asthmatic as a child. Vaccination was in full swing then and my Mum made sure I have everything going! The polio vaccine was just out (the foul tasting syrup on a sugar lump) but I DID catch mumps, measles and chickenpox but thankfully none did any lasting damage.

TB is also becoming very prevelant now - we had the BCG jab as secondary school but not sure if the new strains are resistant to that or not.