As spring approaches, whooping cough, once contained by humans, is making a comeback. Data released by the National Institute of Disease Control and Prevention (NIDCP) showed that 17,105 cases of whooping cough were reported in February 2024, 7,979 more than in December 2023 and nearly 32 times more than the same period last year.

Pertussis refers to an acute respiratory infection caused by Bordetella pertussis infection, which is spread mainly through droplet transmission and is named for the cough that may last up to 100 days.

Airline General Hospital respiratory and critical care medicine, deputy director, chief physician Dou Zhifang introduced, with the common cold, influenza, new crowns and other causes of coughing is different, whooping cough will show severe paroxysmal, spasmodic cough, coughing terminated with chicken-like inhalation sound.

In general, all populations are susceptible, but infants under 1 year of age who have not completed a full course of basic immunisation are the most susceptible, and severe cases are also seen in infants and young children.

Spread mainly by droplet
Pertussis is mainly transmitted by droplet, the patient is the main source of infection, 1~2 days before the onset of the disease to the course of 3 weeks of the most contagious, carriers and atypical symptoms of the patient is also infectious.

It is understood that the early performance of whooping cough does not seem to be very different from the common cold, sometimes even fever is not, the whole course of the disease may be almost no lung signs. And once it progresses to the acute stage, the disease develops rapidly and can lead to severe respiratory failure and even death.

It has been reported that some children have been diagnosed with whooping cough after coughing so hard that it led to haemorrhaging of the bulbous conjunctiva of the eye and bruising around the eye.

The disease was once one of the major causes of childhood morbidity and mortality worldwide, however, since the successful development and introduction of the vaccine, the incidence of the disease has declined for a while. The first whole-cell pertussis vaccine was approved in the United States in 1914, and beginning in the 1940s, developed countries, led by the United States, began to widely vaccinate children against the disease, and in 1978, China included the pertussis vaccine in its immunisation programme (which is available free of charge according to the immunisation schedule). With widespread vaccination, pertussis entered a state of very low prevalence, with the number of reported cases decreasing by more than 99 per cent from the 1930s to the 1980s.

However, as the twenty-first century progressed, pertussis "resurfaced" in many countries around the world. In 2004, 2005, 2010, 2012, and 2014, several large-scale pertussis outbreaks occurred in the United States, including a pertussis epidemic in Washington State in 2012 with an incidence rate as high as 37.5 per 100,000, a 13-fold increase compared to the previous year. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and other countries have also reported a surge in the number of pertussis cases.

In recent years, the number of pertussis incidence in China has also shown an upward trend after maintaining a low level for decades, with the number of reported pertussis cases in the country starting to exceed 10,000 in 2017, and since then, one year at a time, with more than 20,000 cases in 2018 and more than 30,000 in 2019. After the new crown epidemic fell back, the cumulative number of cases reported from 2020 to 2022 is 15,798. The latest data released by the National Institute of Disease Control and Prevention (NIDCP) has certainly sounded another alarm.