1990 — Whooping Cough (ICD-9 code 033.0), 11 (under 1 year), 1 (1-4 years old) — 12

–12  CDC WONDER. Compressed Mortality, 1979-1998. ICD-9 code 033.0, Whooping Cough.

 

Narrative Information

 

Sep 15: “Back to school means crayons and fuzzy-bear backpacks and polka-dot dresses. Also immunizations against infectious diseases. Only some parents think the prevention is worse than the disease. They’re wrong. And they not only endanger their own children, by refusing to have them vaccinated; they put everybody’s children at risk.

 

“The poor don’t get immunized because they can’t afford a private doctor and can’t get it together to find out when the public clinic is doing free vaccinations and get there and stand in line and then come back and do it again for booster shots.

 

(In Wisconsin, students from kindergarten through 12^th grade must provide evidence that they have received required immunizations for their grade level within 30 days of admission to school. Public health departments provide immunization shots free to children of families who can’t afford them…)

 

“Only 77 percent of 2-year-olds are fully immunized, the federal Centers for Disease Control estimate. In inner cities, half the preschoolers are unprotected. As immunization rates fall, cases of mumps pertussis [whooping cough] and measles are rising….

 

“Arizona, Idaho, Washington and other states have been hit by large outbreaks of pertussis, also known as whooping cough, said Dr. Loring Dales, chief of Immunization for the California health department….

 

“Upper-middle-class kids don’t get immunized because their parents have heard horror stories of children who died or became brain-damaged after DPT[1] shots that include the pertussis vaccine. They’ve heard the federal government has set up a program to compensate ‘victims’ of immunization reactions. They haven’t heard about the babies who die and suffer brain damage because they weren’t vaccinated. Nobody goes on Donahue and says: ‘My child got a DPT shot, and he cried a lot but he didn’t get diphtheria or pertussis or tetanus.’

 

“Doctors agree that the polio vaccine causes about one case of polio in 500,000 inoculations, sometimes leading to permanent paralysis. The pertussis vaccine is more controversial. Researchers used to think the pertussis vaccine caused one case of brain damage in 310,000 vaccinations, one case of brain disease in 140,000. Now they think that’s way too high. The real number may be zero.

 

“In the March 23-30 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, James Cherry, of the University of California, Los Angeles pediatrics department, summarized three major studies involving 230,000 children and 713,000 vaccinations and reported: ‘No evience of a causal relationship between pertussis vaccine and permanent neurological illness was found.’

 

“There was a link when English parents turned against the DPT vaccination in the late ‘70s. Immunization rates dropped by more than half, to 30 percent. Whooping cough became epidemic: 104,000 cases over six years;; 400 deaths.

 

“Whooping cough causes convulsions in one of 40 cases, brain disease or permanent brain damage in one of 240. Babies cough so hard they can’t get enough oxygen to the brain. Some suffer permanent lung damage. It causes death in one of 100 babies less than 6 months old.

 

“The disease becomes milder with age; for children over 10, and adults, it’s just a nasty cough that won’t go away and is rarely diagnosed.

 

“Whooping cough was the No. 1 baby killer in the 20’s and ‘30s, killing thousands of children. Vaccination cut that to 1,218 cases and six deaths in 1981. Last year, there were 3,745 cases of whooping cough in the United States. This year, the toll is up 38 percent.

 

“Because of pressure from parents, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program now offers no-questions-asked pay-outs to children who show symptoms of neurological problems after receiving a vaccination. As many as 80 children a year are expected to qualify for payments, which will come from a surcharge on the DPT, MMR (measles, mumps, rebella) and polio vaccine.

 

“In addition to making vaccines more expensive, the program encourages parents to think vaccines are dangerous and that every child who shows symptoms of a problem in the week after a shot did so because of the shot.

 

“Babies get DPT shots at 2, 4 and 6 months of age, just the period when an epileptic baby will have its first convulsion, the period when crib death is most common, Dales said.

 

“The baby of one of his staffers was going to be the star of a state health department videotape on immunization. The tape was never made; the baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. A reaction to the DPT vaccine? No. The baby died the day before the vaccination was to have been given. But what if the shot had been scheduled a day earlier? Dales wonders. The devastated parents would have looked for a reason for their inexplicable loss, and blamed the vaccine.

 

“Parents need to know that immunization saves children’s lives. Your child, somebody else’s child.” (Jacobs, Joanne (San Jose Mercury News). “There’s no good reason to miss immunizations.” Wisconsin State Journal, Madison. 9-15-1990, pp. 1C and 3C.)

 

Sources

 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Compressed Mortality, 1979-1998. ICD-9 code 033.0, Whooping Cough (1990). 2003. Accessed 7-19-2018 at: http://wonder.cdc.gov/cmf-icd9.htm

 

Jacobs, Joanne (San Jose Mercury News). “There’s no good reason to miss immunizations.” Wisconsin State Journal, Madison. 9-15-1990, pp. 1C and 3C. Accessed 7-19-2018 at: https://newspaperarchive.com/madison-wisconsin-state-journal-sep-15-1990-p-17/

[1] Diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus.