WHOOPING COUGH

Marlborough Express, Volume LXXVI, Issue 251, 24 October 1942, Page 3

WHOOPING COUGH

VACCINE AVAILABLE. An important advance in the control of whooping cough has been adopted by the Health Department in the form of a vaccine which is given to babies by injec'tion to inducc artificial protection. Private practitioners have been using the method for some time and the Department now has stocks of the vaccine in the country for use in its pre -school clinics, says a staternent issue'd by the Department. Treatment, as in the case of diphtheria immunisation, is free, and parents can arrange for it on making application to the district Medical Officer of Health. The best time to give the treatment is during the second half-year of the baby's life — usually at about nine months of age, While an attack of whooping cough usually produces a lifelong immunity, no known artificial process does. On a most conservative basis it is considered that a child has at least a fifty-fifty chance of being protected during its most tender years — when it most needs protection. This would | rob whooping cough of much of its evil effect. In New Zealand the majority of deaths from whooping cough occur under the age of five years. In the last twenty-year period for which statistics are available, the deaths from this cause numbered 755, of which 720 occurred in patients under five years and 437 in babies under one year, No spectacular claims are made for the vaccine, but recent tests concluded over a five-year period (outside New Zealand) revealed that while 75 per cent. of non-inoculated children contract whooping cough when exposecl to it, only 13.5 of the inoculated group got it.