Credit : daylife A study by Kaiser Permanente Colorado’s Institute for Health Research, has established that one in every 20 children not immunized against whooping cough are likely to catch the highly contagious disease. In fact, the research found out that only one in 500 cases of immunized children contracted the disease. Though most parents immunize their children, there had been allays of fear that the vaccine for whooping cough also known as pertussis presented health threats such as autism in children leading some parents to shun it. Though immunization has led to the eradication of several diseases such as rubella, small pox, polio, measles and mumps, whooping cough is still common with 10,000 cases in the US in 2007. This has been due to questions of vaccine safety being raised. The disease,

though rarely fatal, leads to severe coughing and mostly affects infants causing death in a minority. Though most go unscathed, the disease is easily transmitted to other people possibly unvaccinated infants since it is highly contagious. Vaccinations for pertussis are administered in five doses to infants of between 2 to 18 months of age. Most vaccines are tightly regulated and thus safe but rumors of vaccine risks abound in the internet and through word of mouth causing parents to make uninformed decisions. It is hoped that this will change with time. The study was government funded and is hailed as the first to use medical records to find out whether children had been immunized or not.

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Refusing Whooping Cough Vaccine Shown to Raise Risk