July 19, 2012 -- Whooping cough cases could be headed toward a 50-year high in the United States, and the CDC says the nation is on track for record rates of the disease. Twice as many cases have been reported so far this year as at the same point last year, a CDC official said today. Nationwide, nearly 18,000 cases of whooping cough, or pertussis, and nine deaths have been reported in 2012, Anne Schuchat, MD, director of CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters. "We would need to go back to 1959 to find as many cases reported by this time in the year," she said.

Whooping Cough Worst in Babies More than 3,000 cases have been reported in Washington State alone, where health officials have declared a whooping cough epidemic. Pregnant women and anyone else likely to come into contact with young babies are being urged to get booster shots to prevent whooping cough, even if they have been vaccinated in the past. That's because babies are most likely to die or be hospitalized when they get the highly contagious bacterial disease, which is named for the characteristic cough that accompanies it. All of the whooping cough fatalities that have occurred this year have been among babies who were too young to be fully vaccinated, Schuchat said. For children, the whooping cough vaccine DTaP is given in five doses, with the starting dose recommended at 2 months of age and the last dose recommended between the ages of 4 and 6 years. More than half of children diagnosed with whooping cough before their first birthday require hospitalization. Compared to children who are fully vaccinated, unvaccinated children have eight times the risk for getting whooping cough, Schuchat said. When vaccinated children do come down with the disease, they tend to have milder symptoms and are less likely to pass their infection onto others.