Mayo Clinic (USA) video. A mother holds her infant girl in an intensive care unit. Her baby has whooping cough and is coughing severely.
Warning to viewers: some of the content in these videos may be upsetting.
Babies are particularly vulnerable to whooping cough until they have received all 3 immunisations at 6 weeks, 3 months and 5 months old. So it's important to immunise on time, every time, and for people who are ill to stay away from babies until they are fully immunised.
Whooping cough - a baby in Starship's Intensive Care
A doctor at Starship Children's Health talks about a baby with whooping cough in Starship's Intensive Care Unit. At the time of filming, the baby was 8 weeks old and had been seriously ill in hospital for about 6 weeks.
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Dr Fiona Miles, Intensivist, Starship Hospital
Te Uru is nearly 8 weeks old now she has been in hospital for 6 weeks of her life with whooping cough. She became unwell when she was only 2 weeks old and spent 2 weeks at another hospital and then came to the intensive care at Starship with a whooping cough because she was so desperately sick. She has needed a lot of help over her month with us in the intensive care unit including having a breathing tube put down because she was coughing so hard she couldn't breathe in and couldn't get oxygen and nearly had a full respiratory and cardiac arrest so her heart and lungs weren't working because she was coughing so hard. We get a lot of babies that are as sick as Te Uru every year with a whooping cough and it's usually because they've been too young to have the immunisations or because the parents have chosen not to.
It was pretty scary when Te Uru needed to have the breathing tube on Friday wasn't it? How did you feel when all that was happening?
Leeanne Clark, Te Uru's mother
I was scared, terrified.
Dr Fiona Miles
Did you think she might die then?
Leeanne Clark
Yeah, I did.
Dr Fiona Miles
She looked like she was going to didn't she?
Leeanne Clark
Yes, yes, hard.
Dr Fiona Miles
Yeah, really hard and it's been hard being in hospital for such a long time too hasn't it?
Leeanne Clark
Yeah.
Dr Fiona Miles
Yeah. Do you still get worried that she's going to die from this?
Leeanne Clark
Yes, yeah. Go to bed you know worrying that something might happen. I get up in the morning and come down and she might not be here.
Dr Fiona Miles
Yeah, and how do you feel when we ring you up?
Leeanne Clark
Oh my heart drops. You know every time I get a phone call from the nurse or something I just I don't really want to answer it.
I'm Leeanne and this is my baby Te Uru and I'm gutted to see her go through this. Very sad and scary, very scary.
Whooping cough - a mother's story
Watch a video of a parent talking about their experience of their baby catching whooping cough. Mackenzie was just 7 weeks old when she became ill with whooping cough, early in 2012. She was admitted to hospital where she spent 10 days in isolation. Mackenzie's Mum, Anna Gibson, says they are pretty sure Mackenzie's Dad gave her whooping cough but it was too late by the time they realised he had it. Mackenzie has fully recovered now but Anna wants to tell her story so that other parents don't have to go through the same experience.
KidsHealth video
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Anna Gibson, Mackenzie's mother
I'm Anna and this is Mackenzie and she's 7 and a half months old and she got whooping cough when she was
7 weeks old. She just got a little cough to start with and then it just progressively got worse and worse.
[audio of Mackenzie coughing]
She would start coughing and just cough and cough and didn't know to breathe back in so she'd cough and cough and cough and turn blue in the face and then eventually take a big < audio of large inhale> breath in and then cough, cough, cough again. And that was the hard bit when I didn't know what it was and being at home and she's tuning blue and sort of thinking what happens if this goes a little bit further?
Eventually they admitted us to hospital so they put us in isolation and we were in there for 10 days. The first few days in there were pretty awful and then she sort of progressively got better and better and better until we didn't need the oxygen anymore. We're pretty sure that she got it from her dad but it was too late before we realised that he had whooping cough because as an adult, you sort of you have the cough but you don't think much of it often and so before he sort of realised that she already had it so it was sort of too little too late. Yeah he felt pretty bad that he had passed it on.
[audio of Mackenzie coughing and crying]
Before she was born we learned about the vaccinations in antenatal with a booster vaccination for adults and I said to him 'you should go and get one of those' but then we forgot about it and didn't do anything about it and sure enough he got it. So yeah I would have pushed it further and made him and probably got it myself, the booster vaccination beforehand because if he hadn't of got it then she potentially wouldn't have got it either.
Health professionals talking about how severe whooping cough can be
Filmed in 2012 during a whooping cough epidemic, the video features health professionals talking about how severe whooping cough can be, particularly in young babies, and the importance of immunisation to protect them. See the transcript.
Filmed in 2012 during a whooping cough epidemic, the video features health professionals talking about how severe whooping cough can be, particularly in young babies, and the importance of immunisation to protect them.
transcribeTranscript
Dr Nikki Turner, General Practitioner; Director of the Immunisation Advisory Centre, The University of Auckland
Whooping cough comes in waves about every four to six years. We always have a lot around in the community but currently we've got a very large amount in the community so everybody in New Zealand is at risk of catching whooping cough at the moment.
Dr John Cameron, General Practitioner; Clinical Director, Procare
Whooping cough is a serious disease no matter what age you catch it. In the adult, you don't want to be coughing for a hundred days; it's very unpleasant. For a newborn baby or a very young child it's catastrophic.
[Audio of young baby coughing and mother comforting baby]
Dr John Cameron
They struggle for breath. They've got very little resilience about how they will keep on breathing and to see a struggling child with whooping cough is one sight I never want to see.
[Audio of baby on a respirator]
Dr Nikki Turner
In New Zealand, if you end up in hospital as an infant with whooping cough you've got a one in ten chance of ending up in the baby intensive care unit, and of those in the intensive care unit, you have a one in six chance of ending up with severe lung damage, brain damage or death. This is a very severe illness.
[Audio of suctioning a baby with whooping cough]
Dr Nikki Turner
Whooping cough is actually a very common disease across the whole community. We recognise it in the infants because it's so severe. It often goes unrecognized in adults. In fact probably twenty maybe thirty percent of adults who have a cough lasting more than two weeks may well have whooping cough. So there's a lot of whooping cough out there - in adult people, in the elderly, in many groups in our population that's currently not being recognized and they're at risk of spreading their disease to others.
Dr John Cameron
The only way, the absolute only way we're going to get the protection that we need for these young bubbies is by immunising. We need to immunise these young bubbies as soon as we can. We're going to use the standard immunisation schedule vaccinations at six weeks, three months and five months. That's important to do those base ones but it's also going to be important to immunise those people in and around that newborn child until they've completed those three immunisations.
Dr Nikki Turner
For those of us who are in close contact with young infants we can also be vaccinated against whooping cough. So think about parents, grandparents, anyone in close contact with young infants up to about a year of age. Pregnant women also can be vaccinated after twenty weeks of pregnancy.
Dr John Cameron
What we really are after is to reduce down the risk of that mum bringing whooping cough into the comm ... into her household that might infect her unimmunised or partially immunised child.
[Audio of Te Uru’s mother patting Te Uru on the back while Te Uru coughs. Background noise in intensive care unit]
Leeanne Clark, Te Uru’s mother
Her lips are going purple.
[Audio of Te Uru coughing and struggling for breath. Monitor beeping. Background noise in intensive care unit]
Dr Nikki Turner
Whooping cough is a tricky disease – you don't get protection for life from either having the disease or having the vaccine so sadly even if you've been vaccinated way in the past, you can't guarantee protection, you still need to think vaccination.
Acknowledgements
Whooping cough and A baby in Starship's Intensive Care are joint KidsHealth and Immunisation Advisory Centre productions. Our grateful thanks to the families of the babies in these videos for providing home footage or consenting to filming. Our thanks also to the health professionals for their interviews.
Whooping cough - a mother's story is a joint KidsHealth, Immunisation Advisory Centre and Ministry of Health production. Our grateful thanks to Anna Gibson for sharing Mackenzie's story.
