Here is a story that I wrote during my internship at the Globe and Mail on February 5, 2010.
Nine cases of whooping cough have been diagnosed over the past week in the Kootenay-Boundary region, an outbreak that health officials attribute to low rates of immunization in the region.
With nine confirmed cases, the Kootenay-Boundary outbreak has almost reached the annual southeast B.C. average of 10 to 20 cases.
No one has died or has been hospitalized.
Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, is a bacterial disease spread by coughing. It causes inflammation of the airways and may cause a person to cough for up to three months.
The disease is particularly harmful to infants and toddlers because of their small airways.
“For infants, they can get so short of breath from those coughing spells that they actually have a loss of oxygenated blood to the brain and get brain damage or they can die,” said Dr. Rob Parker, the medical health officer for the Kootenay-Boundary region.
With 19 cases in the past 8 weeks, the Interior Health Authority, which serves the Southeastern part of B.C., is speeding up the vaccination process for the disease in order to protect infants as soon as possible.
Pertussis is not new to the Kootenay-Boundary region.
In a 2006 outbreak, there were 108 cases of pertussis in Kootenay-Boundary alone according to a report from the Centre for Disease Control in B.C.. This is due to the fact that the region has a 69 per cent immunization-rate, the lowest in southeast B.C. which has an average of 78 per cent.
“There is at least a portion of the population there who … live there for a more rural lower paced perhaps more naturalistic lifestyle, at least for some of them, it incorporates a strong anti-vaccination beliefs,” said Dr. Parker.
According to Dr. Parker, this group makes up a very small percentage of the population but is causing approximately ten to twenty per cent of parents to doubt the safety of vaccinations.
“We are making a push…so that parents have information about both the outbreak risk and the safety of the vaccine” said Dr. Parker.
Dr. Parker expects to see more cases come in for at least a month. “This is just the start of the outbreak.”
