The majority of confirmed cases, nationally and in Washington, are of the influenza A H3 variety, and the head of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, says this year’s flu shot is protecting well against those strains of the bug. (So far, the incidence of pertussis remains low, too.) Continue reading Washington State’s Flu Season is Now Open
“After the fifth dose of DTaP, the odds of acquiring pertussis increased by an average of 42% per year,” the study’s authors write. Said another way, the overall protection rate of the DTaP vaccine declines to 71 percent from 95 percent by the fifth year after the fifth shot.
For context, unvaccinated children have odds of getting whooping cough “at least eight times higher than children who received all five doses” of DTaP (CDC pdf). Continue reading Whooping Cough Vaccine (DTaP) Not as Long-Lived as Thought
A little over a month since whooping cough crossed the epidemic threshold in Washington State, political officials seem persuaded that the nagging cough is not going to go away on its own. Last week, Governor Gregoire announced that she’d be making available, along with $210,000 already allocated from the Department of Health, an extra $90,000 from the emergency fund to combat pertussis. Continue reading What’s Washington Doing to Stem Our Whooping Cough Epidemic?
