Whooping cough outbreak in southern Manitoba related to non-vaccination

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This article was published 06/11/2015 (3600 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The mother of a baby hospitalized with severe complications from whooping cough urged parents on Friday to get their children vaccinated.

But at least one doctor says vaccines can be a tough sell for some parents who oppose them.

The family with the sick baby lives in southern Manitoba, the location of a whooping cough outbreak that has spread to 40 children and adults, the majority of whom were never vaccinated.

At two months of age, Naomi Murray’s daughter, Phoenix, had the first of five shots given to children to protect against whooping cough.

A month later, around Thanksgiving, the infant got really sick, the Winkler mother said.

“She would go into apnea, that’s where you stop breathing. That’s risky with babies, they don’t cough. They stop breathing. It was very scary, very hard to see,” the Winkler mother said.

Her daughter is still sick but recovering at home after a hospital stay in Winnipeg.

“We went over to the Children’s Hospital where they put her in isolation because she was not breathing. There were a few times where she would go blue. They put us into 24-hour monitoring and isolation, so we were in a plastic-wrapped room basically and they were all gowning up… It was pretty horrible for us,” she told the Free Press.

Hospital staff took special precautions to treat Phoenix so they didn’t spread whooping cough to other children on the same ward.

“They basically had to isolate her and we were with her the entire time and every time we came out of the room, we need to gown up and put masks on to make sure we didn’t pass it on to other children,” Murray said. “I spent the entire time, five days, with her.”

Whooping cough is the second most common contagious childhood disease in Canada and while doctors report half a dozen cases in southern Manitoba every year, this year the number soared in the region.

Dr. Tim Hilderman is the province’s leading communicable disease expert and the medical officer of health for the Interlake Eastern Regional Health Authority.

He said of the 40 cases reported in the Southern Regional Health Authority, centered around Winkler, most were children and adults who were never vaccinated.

“I can tell you of the 40 cases, only four of them had their complete immunization. Only four were up to date,” Hilderman said.

That’s a concern, Hilderman said.

“The majority of cases were unimmunized and they weren’t below two months of age (the age the first shot is administered). Eight were over 18. Approximately 20 were under the age of five and the majority of those were unimmunized, not even partially,” the doctor said.

Doctors have reported a drop in new cases over the last month, suggesting the peak was in August and September, but it’s still too early to say for sure, Hilderman said.

Murray said seeing her daughter end up in isolation at the Children’s Hospital in Winnipeg turned her into an ardent vaccine advocate.

“I want people to realize vaccinations aren’t just about you. They’re about the people who are around you, who are vulnerable like my daughter. She was in the 15 per cent who didn’t get complete immunity right away,” Murray said. “That includes adults.”

The Murrays believe their daughter caught whooping cough from the son of a family friend, who had not vaccinated her toddler.

Tests on the toddler after Phoenix fell deathly ill showed up positive for whooping cough, Murray said.

Vaccines at any age and especially for children are a sensitive topic.

Medical studies in the 1990s erroneously linked vaccine reactions to autism among other conditions. One after another in the following two decades, the studies were thoroughly discredited.

In an unprecedented move, the British Lancet withdrew the leading study — authored by the father of the anti-vaccine movement — twice, once in 2004 and again in 2010.

Years later, the anti-vaccine movement is still entrenched; the antipathy is deeper than most people realize.

“It is difficult when you get into those under-immunized populations and people chosing not to be immunized and changing those beliefs. It’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy, not as simple as holding more clinics,” Hilderman said.

“The Southern RHA does a tremendous job of getting people access to those vaccines. The issue is: What about those people who don’t want the vaccines? What’s our approach to them…” Hilderman said.

“And that’s an approach we’re still learning… It’s different for different groups of people who aren’t immunizing,” he said.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca