Health Alert: Whooping Cough Hits Borough Park
Heads up, parents: Make sure your kids’ vaccinations are up to date.
Whooping cough reports have spiked in three Brooklyn neighborhoods — Borough Park, Williamsburg, and Crown Heights — infecting at least 109 people in the Orthodox Jewish enclaves this year, announced the Department of Health today.
“Delays in on-time initiation and completion of the pertussis-containing vaccines series remain problematic in the affected communities, facilitating ongoing transmission,” said Jennifer Rosen, director of the Health Department’s Bureau of Immunization Surveillance.
The disease, also known as Pertussis, is a respiratory infection that causes violent coughing and sometimes vomiting, and typically lasts up to 10 days.
The New York Post reports:
Toddlers and infants make up the majority of cases. About half were not vaccinated at all or didn’t get the full set of shots, authorities said in an alert to medical providers.
Only 3 percent of the 37 mothers of infants with whooping cough received the recommended tetanus-diptheria-acellularr pertussis vaccination during pregnancy, the alert said.
Health officials are urging doctors to recall patients who are not up to date with vaccines so they can provide prompt antibiotic treatment to affected patients.Typically, a total of 200 cases are reported annually across the city, reports the Post. So far five infants have been hospitalized this year, and one has come down with pneumonia, according to health officials.
Assemblyman Dov Hikind warned parents today to make sure their kids are up to date on their shots.
“It isn’t one single vaccination that deals with the problem,” he told News 12. “There are five over a period of time from when the baby is a couple months old to four months and into the first couple of years.”
Doctors say antibiotics is effective in treating whooping cough when it’s caught early.