The U.S. is experiencing more than four times as many whooping cough cases compared with last year — a spike that some experts attribute to post-pandemic vaccine fatigue.
“With the increase in vaccine hesitancy that has been going on since the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re seeing outbreaks occurring in kids who are not vaccinated,” said Dr. Tina Tan, president-elect of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that 14,569 cases of whooping cough had been reported so far in 2024. That’s a significant increase over last year’s total of 3,475 cases.
According to a CDC spokesperson, preliminary cases reported so far this year are the highest since 2014.
The bacterial illness is officially called pertussis but is often referred to as “whooping cough” because of the sound people — especially babies — make when trying to get enough oxygen despite ongoing coughing fits.
Doctors said the newly reported numbers are likely a vast underestimate of the true spread of the highly contagious respiratory infection.
“For every case of whooping cough we find, there’s probably 10 of them out there that didn’t come to medical attention,” said Dr. Jim Conway, a pediatrician and infectious disease expert at UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin.
Doctors at Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., told NBC News that they hadn’t seen any recent cases of whooping cough. Georgia saw an uptick in whooping cough cases over the summer, said Dr. Andi Shane, division chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, but that’s since declined.
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For more on whooping cough (pertussis), visit cdc.gov/pertussis.