Four cases of whooping cough spark health warning

“In the past two weeks, four students have been identified with symptoms of pertussis, which is a respiratory illness that starts like a cold and develops into a severe cough within one to two weeks,” UHS associate director Janet Finnie ’84 said in an e-mail.

Peter Johnsen, the director of medical services for UHS, explained that people with whooping cough suffer from bouts of severe coughing, sometimes so severe that patients vomit or have trouble catching their breath.

“It is possible to cough hard enough to crack a rib,” he added. “In one of the students, there was a question of that.”

Johnsen noted that whooping cough is difficult to detect because its symptoms are similar to those of common colds or bronchitis. Often, the disease is not detected until the cough has persisted for several weeks.

University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96 said the first three cases of pertussis on campus were directly connected to each other, but she added that UHS has not yet determined any direct connection between the fourth case and the previous three. The first diagnosis was made on March 28, the second on March 31, the third on April 10, and the most recent on April 15.

The campus health alert was sent out following the diagnosis of the fourth case, Cliatt said.

“If there is a fourth student that is not connected to the original three students who became ill, we want to make sure it’s not spreading beyond the four students,” she explained. “If it were the case that all the cases originated in one dorm room and everyone knew each other, we would understand that the contagion was caused by close contact among that small group of students and that it was contained by that small group of students.”

Though whooping cough is most dangerous to children ages 7 and younger, the e-mail was sent as a “precautionary measure” since college students can still suffer serious symptoms.

State and local officials did not feel that a quarantine was “necessary or required,” Cliatt added, explaining that the standard of care is to prescribe prophylactic antibiotics to stem the spread of the illness.

Cliatt said that the advisory e-mail would inform the community of the health situation on campus, encourage people to take hygienic precautions and, “by encouraging students to come forward,” help UHS determine if the presence of the disease on campus is restricted to the four confirmed cases.

Several students who were determined to be at risk for catching the disease from those infected received e-mails from UHS advising them to visit the Urgent Clinic at McCosh Health Center to get a prescription of prophylactic antibiotics.

“It is possible that within a small class setting you may have had exposure,” the e-mail cautioned. “If you are having significant cough symptoms we would also like to test you.”

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Johnsen said that UHS is particularly concerned with University students spreading whooping cough to young children. “One of the things we made sure that we wanted to cover is looking at the places where students volunteer so that students who are volunteering don’t carry something to young children,” he explained. “We have been kind of aggressive in trying to ensure we don’t transmit this to others that way.”

An additional advisory was sent to the Student Volunteers Council e-mail list, for example, because several of the organization’s volunteers regularly interact with young children.

Johnsen added that whooping cough is becoming more prevalent in young adults. “The immunity people have as children starts to wane by the time you hit your teens and 20s. By the time you get to [college student] age, the protection is gone.”

To counteract this decline in immunity, individuals are given the Tdap booster vaccine, which is a booster vaccine for the standard pertussis vaccine DTaP. “We recommend people get the Tdap,” Johnsen said.

Even those who have been immunized are not necessarily protected against pertussis. Johnsen explained that “the vaccine is thought to be in the neighborhood of 90 percent effective … so it’s possible someone would fall into that 10 percent.”