You're contagious from about 6 days after the start of cold-like symptoms to 3 weeks after the coughing starts. If you start antibiotics within 3 weeks of starting to cough, it will reduce the time you're contagious for. The whooping cough vaccine protects babies and children from getting whooping cough. That's why it's important to have all the routine NHS vaccinations.
If you're pregnant you should also have the whooping cough vaccine — ideally between 16 and 32 weeks. Sometimes pertussis symptoms do not develop for as long as 3 weeks. The disease usually starts with cold-like symptoms and maybe a mild cough or fever. In babies, the cough can be minimal or not even there. Pertussis is most dangerous for babies. About half of babies younger than 1 year who get the disease need care in the hospital.
Learn more about pertussis complications. Pertussis in its early stages appears to be nothing more than the common cold. Therefore, healthcare professionals often do not suspect or diagnose it until the more severe symptoms appear.
After 1 to 2 weeks and as the disease progresses, the traditional symptoms of pertussis may appear and include:. Although adults and older children usually survive the disease—while enduring considerable discomfort—it can be fatal in infants, the age group with the highest pertussis death rate. Antibiotics can cure the disease if the infection is identified early enough, but there is no treatment that can neutralize the pertussis toxin once it's present in the lungs.
An infected person first shows symptoms of a common cold, including sniffles and a low-grade fever; but once the characteristic cough develops, it can last for weeks. One nickname for pertussis is the " day cough. Pertussis kills about , people each year worldwide, most of them infants. According to the U. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC , infants under one year old not only are at greatest risk of death from the disease, but they also have the highest reported rate of pertussis.
Even in older children, the consequences of the disease can be serious; one in 20 children who contract pertussis has nervous system damage. The disease, which passes from person to person through the air, is highly contagious; one infected person can spread the disease to more than a dozen other people.
An infected person is contagious even when symptoms are indistinguishable from those of a cold, before the "whooping" cough begins. In the United States, pertussis affected more than , people a year in the late s and early s. The advent of a vaccine against the disease in the s led to a drop in those numbers, to a low point of just over 1, cases in Why is whooping cough pertussis making a comeback?
Pertussis also known as whooping cough is a highly contagious infection of the respiratory tract. It spreads through droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes. Pertussis is a cyclic disease with epidemics occurring every few years. Risk Factors. Canadian guidelines recommend that all children get four doses of the combined vaccine that includes pertussis protection — at age 2 months, 4 months, 6 months and 18 months.
Your child will get a booster vaccine at 4 to 6 years of age.
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