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Just when you get rid of one cough, another emerges in its place.
While the the Covid-19 pandemic officially ended last year, cases of pertussis — or whooping cough, as it’s more commonly known — have been spiking across Europe in recent months.
The retro infection, a staple of Charles Dickens’ novels, is the latest Victorian-era ailment to stage a comeback in the West after an increase in measles, syphilis, gout, leprosy and malaria.
In Czechia — where there are reports of whooping cough vaccine shortages — case numbers are at their highest in 60 years, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). There have also been sharp rises in Denmark, Belgium, Spain and the U.K. in recent months.
“Most of the rise in the past couple of years has been because of a return to pre-Covid levels,” said Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the university of East Anglia. That’s except for this year, he said, “when infections have increased dramatically and are on track for exceeding any annual total we have seen in more than three decades.”
To put it in perspective — in 2023, a total of 853 cases were recorded in England. In February of this year alone, there were 913 cases, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).
The current European hotspot is Croatia, which reported 6,261 cases in the first two and a half months of this year.
A report from the British Medical Journal says that part of the reason for the spread is a drop in vaccination rates.
In most European countries, babies get their first two doses of the combined whooping cough, diptheria and tetanus vaccine between two and 12 months, with another dose by the time they’re 2 years old and a final dose between 3 and 7.
But to protect newborn babies from the disease, pregnant women can also be offered pertussis vaccines. In England, the BMJ reports, uptake among this group has fallen from over 70 percent in September 2017 to 58 percent in September 2023.
That’s particularly concerning given the risk posed to young infants.
While whooping cough can be very unpleasant for adults — cracked ribs can be a side effect of the ailment known in Serbian as the “donkey cough” because of the hacking sound sufferers make — pertussis can have serious complications in babies.
Teenagers between 15 and 19 make up the majority of current cases but “virtually all deaths” in the EU and EEA this year have been in babies under three months, according to the ECDC. There have been four deaths in recent weeks in the Netherlands, more than double the usual annual rate.
Covid hangover
Europe’s disease agency also suggested Covid could be to blame for the rise.
“The current increase is potentially linked to lower circulation during COVID-19 pandemic, combined with suboptimal vaccination uptake in certain groups during the COVID-19 pandemic,” it wrote in a March report.
Getting people vaccinated is key to stemming the outbreak, but that’s becoming easier said than done.
In the U.K., five regional health services reported that the pandemic adversely affected vaccination rates, on top of a longer-term decline.
“We saw a lot of misinformation from the anti-vax lobby across the pandemic and I think there was quite a concern from a few of us that that misinformation would spread into hesitancy around routine immunization,” Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, told POLITICO.
Head also pointed to the measles outbreak in Europe which has also been largely attributed to falling immunization levels.
