As children head back to school this week, parents are being warned of a sharp increase in whooping cough in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT.
The number of whooping cough cases quadrupled between last April and December in New South Wales.
In Victoria and the ACT reported cases doubled.
While figures are not at the highs seen during the last major outbreak in 2010/2011, authorities are concerned another outbreak may be imminent.
Dr Nicholas Wood, a staff specialist general paediatrician at Sydney’s Westmead Children’s Hospital, said whooping cough, or ‘pertussis’, is a condition that has fairly regular outbreaks in Australia.
“It’s well known every three or four years we get a bit of an epidemic – there was a very bad epidemic three or four years ago,” he said.
“Hopefully this is not going to become another big epidemic so we’re watching the cases.”
Dr Vicky Sheppeard, the director of communicable disease at NSW Health, said cases were clearly on the rise in the state.
“We’re watching the number of cases very closely,” she said.
“We got a low in about the middle of 2014, down as low as about 140 cases [per month] and now we’re up to close to 500 cases per month.
“In the peak of the previous outbreak, we had close to 2,000 per month recorded.”
Dr Sheppeard said the disease often came in waves of outbreaks, because immunity waned with time.
“Whooping cough is a bit different to the other bugs we deal with,” she said.
“Whether you have the disease, the infection, or whether you get vaccinated that immunity starts to wear off after a few years.
“Every few years the number of people in the community that are susceptible to infection that don’t have immunity build up to large numbers allowing outbreaks to occur.”
Dr Sheppeard said students in the later years of primary school were particularly susceptible to catching whooping cough, though the infection for them was often quite mild.
“It’s probably the upper years of primary school that we start to see more cases of whooping cough introduced into schools,” she said.
“That’s because children have had a booster when they’re four years of age and the next booster’s due at 12. We offer that to all children in year 7.”
But it means that older children can be contagious and spreading the disease through the community with few or no symptoms.
‘We thought it was asthma … it didn’t sound like whooping cough’
When Emma Payten’s 12-year-old daughter Ellen developed a dry cough late last year she was not too concerned.
“We thought it was asthma,” she said.
“It didn’t sound like the traditional whooping cough with a ‘whoop’ and she hadn’t had any other symptoms of whooping cough like a fever or a runny nose or anything like that.”
Medical testing later revealed both Ellen and her nine-year-old brother Nick had the highly contagious disease.
Both were then kept away from school and given antibiotics even though they had few symptoms.
In young babies, whooping cough kills on average 1 in every 100 babies infected.
Ms Payten was horrified to learn that her children had been out in the community for many days, while highly contagious with a potentially deadly condition.
Dr Wood said it was a common issue.
“The problem is the adults and older children have this cough, going on for many days and weeks and they can transmit it to the young infants,” he said.
Health guidelines recommend that new parents, grandparents and carers of young babies be vaccinated.
But health experts said the whole community should be aware of whooping cough symptoms and how to stay safe.
Dr Vicky Sheppeard from NSW Health said there were three steps everyone could take to help protect vulnerable members of the community.
“Our campaign is ‘Identify, Prevent, Protect’ so it’s about getting cases diagnosed – work we do with general practitioners and hospitals to identify cases,” she said.
“Preventing is keeping small babies away from people who have a coughing illness and protection is about the vaccination.”