2.4 – Under the knife

An addendum to the whooping cough issue, which is somewhat specific to whooping cough, is that even the current Australian vaccine schedule is insufficient due to the longevity of the vaccination's effect. Under reasonable rates of vaccination every few years (sometimes four to five) there is an expected 'epidemic' because often parents of new infants infect the child while remaining asymptomatic (because the parent's immunity has faded after their last vaccination as a child). Hence, the article recommending parents receive booster shots which is somewhat out of place given the overall tone of the article if one has a decent understanding of vaccines and dealing with epidemics.

What makes these 'natural' variations in case rates worse is often there are some pockets of populations which have low immunisation rates. In WA we have a community in the South-West which can be most aptly described as a hippy commune which was hit particularly hard about 5 years ago under one of these normal flare-ups of whopping cough events.

I remember this because I was doing some work experience in the WA Health department's directorate which administered vaccination programs and they were scrambling to round up enough vaccines to deal with a particularly bad outbreak of whooping cough (which ultimately was ineffective in dealing with the outbreak which had subsided by the time they were turning up to schools with vaccines and became more of a PR exercise).

However, the government in Australia isn't a fan of subsidising adult vaccination and in the instance of whooping cough this places children too young to be vaccinated at risk.