The terrifying 100-day cough sweeping Britain: Cases are up 3,800 per cent with ... trends now
There’s a cough going around that paediatricians tell me is making babies really unwell. What’s deeply worrying is that some very young babies have died from it. The cough is whooping cough — or pertussis.
This is an illness that can be prevented, or its impact reduced, by vaccination.
But there’s been a surge in cases recently: you may well have heard people complaining about the 100-day cough. I’ve had it (and ended up in A&E when I couldn’t breathe) and wrote about it for Mail Online.
Since January, there have already been 8,015 doctor notifications (whooping cough is a notifiable disease) and 2,041 laboratory-confirmed cases, compared with just 207 (so a rise of about 3,800 per cent) and 30 respectively last year for the same period.
There were 52 cases of babies under three months with whooping cough in January and February alone this year; by contrast, there were only 48 cases for the whole of last year.
Riley Hughes (pictured with his mum Catherine) was otherwise healthy when he died from whooping cough aged just 32 days in 2015
And these figures may be a significant underestimate, as people with mild disease may not see a doctor.
‘We are seeing massive numbers of cases of pertussis at the moment,’ Dr Liz Whittaker, a paediatric consultant and honorary clinical senior lecturer in the department of infectious disease at Imperial College London, tells me.
Paediatric intensive care units are on ‘surge capacity’ for pertussis and measles, meaning there are many cases.
Dr Ronny Cheung, a consultant paediatrician from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, adds: ‘There’s no doubt we’ve been seeing quite a lot more of it on the wards and A&E in recent times. My suspicion is we’re probably still underestimating the true prevalence at the moment.’
While adults describe it as the worst cough they’ve ever had — causing difficulty breathing, incontinence and even fractured ribs — it can be fatal in babies. ‘The mortality is one death in every 100 in the under three months category,’ says Dr Whittaker. ‘We don’t see this in other age groups.
‘As well as coughing, which is quite severe, they can stop breathing.’
Their white blood cells also increase, sometimes reaching very high levels, ‘causing the blood vessels to clog up, and causing cardiac failure’, adds Dr Whittaker.
The rise in cases has already claimed the lives of babies too young to receive the vaccine.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) reported the death of one baby in the last quarter of 2023. But colleagues have told me of further deaths that aren’t yet showing in official figures.
Whooping cough is a highly infectious bacterial infection, but those under three months are most at risk because they’re too young to be vaccinated.
The first dose of the pertussis vaccine is normally given at two months, which is why pregnant women are offered the jab between 16 and 32 weeks as the antibodies pass across the placenta and protect the baby in the first few months of life.
Dozens of babies in the UK used to die every year before this vaccination programme was introduced.
‘Most of our admissions are still in the pre-immunisation under-three-month group,’ says Dr Cheung. ‘I’ve seen these babies in my practice where they come with coughing bouts, apnoea [pauses in breathing] or looking very dusky [i.e. blue] or desaturating [with low oxygen levels], and that’s very worrying.’
The number of two-year-olds who have had the full round of vaccinations has dropped over the past decade and cases of whooping cough are shooting up
Danielle Knox knows just how terrifying this can be. Her then seven-week old son Tom was admitted to hospital for a week in December with a severe cough and episodes of apnoea. He was treated with antibiotics and needed regular suctioning.
As Danielle, 33, a health sciences lecturer from Glasgow, told me last week, because Tom didn’t have a ‘whoop’ sound, he wasn’t tested for pertussis; but very young babies do not have the typical ‘whoop’.
Other children need multiple readmissions for it. ‘I had a patient who was admitted for the third time in six weeks — they’re still having blue spells at night,’ explains Dr Cheung.
Airfinity, a disease-forecasting company, says ‘the risk of infections is expected to remain elevated in the coming weeks’.
