Whooping Cough Essay

Improved Essays
Bordetella pertussis, also known as whooping cough is a bacterial infection of the upper respiratory system. Symptoms range from that of a common cold too short periods of apnea and in extreme cases death. Pertussis is a highly contagious disease that can affect anyone but is more common in children and in infants. Although this disease is preventable and treatable it is currently and continually on the rise. The whooping cough is caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis. B. pertussis is a small, aerobic, gram-negative coccobacillus (U.S. Pharmacist, 2015, p.50). The pertussis toxin, as well as other antigenic factors produced by the bacterium, are primarily responsible for the clinical manifestations of the disease and the immunity that occurs following infection or vaccination (U.S. P, 2015, p.50). The whooping cough mainly affects infants under one year of …show more content…
During this phase, the beginning phase, diagnosis is difficult due to the symptoms being very general to the common cold. As the disease progresses into the second stage the symptoms become more serious and specific to the disease. These symptoms include, continuous uncontrollable coughing spells, whooping sound after cough, difficulty breathing, short periods of apnea, vomiting after cough, dehydration, extreme fatigue, and red or blue discoloration of the face due to the lack of oxygen. Diagnosis in this stage is much less difficult. The incubation period for whooping cough is usually 7 to 10 days, but can be as long as 21 days (Pertussis, 2015). The whooping cough causes prolonged symptoms of 1 to 2 weeks of common cold symptoms, followed by up to three months of severe coughing. The last stage consists of another few weeks of recovery with gradual clearing of symptoms except in some children, the recovery period can last for months (Pertussis,

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Whooping Cough Case Study

    • 949 Words
    • 4 Pages

    1.)a.) What percentage of U.S. parents vaccinate their children according to the recommended schedule? 90% of the U.S. parents vaccinate their children according to the recommended schedule. b.) How many immunizations are recommended for children during their first two years of life?…

    • 949 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    It 's also a very common ailment of childhood. Croup is a cough that sounds like a deep raspy barking seal. Your child might have some trouble breathing because the virus causes inflammation around the larynx and the bronchial passage is blocked with mucus and that’s where the raspy noise comes from with each inhaled breath your child gives. Croup is highly contagious to other children; it can last from five to six days. Some signs of croup are cold like symptoms, runny nose, cough, low or mild fever and often worsen at night.…

    • 829 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Most symptoms will start to…

    • 447 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Whooping cough, or pertussis, is a deadly disease that causes the victim to begin severely coughing and wheezing (Mayo Clinic, 1998). Today, we have vaccinations to treat whooping cough, but some infants can still die from…

    • 702 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Influenza Research Paper

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages

    727 words Influenza nfluenza is also called the flu but it is not your common flu it is a highly contagious viral ere illness and can also cause infection the viral infection influenza can kill. The flu causes life threatening complications including pneumonia. The flu is spread by direct contact with a person with the infection and a person without. The estimated amount of deaths that influenza assist with is around three thousand in just Australia.…

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Cowpox Vaccine History

    • 632 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Vaccines are one of the greatest medical achievements in the history. Diseases like smallpox, polio, and whooping cough where once common and now are rarely seen. Vaccinations stop the spread of disease and should be mandatory. Smallpox is a disease caused by the varoil virus. The most common is a rash that covers the face arms and legs that will soon turn to blisters.…

    • 632 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    I was assigned to be a lawyer agreeing that vaccine should be mandatory. The research that was assigned for my part of the presentation was case studies and laws. Throughout my research I discovered that the state of California now requires children to be vaccinated prior to entering school. If a parent does not want the child to be vaccinated they will have to attend private independent study school from home. However, if a parent wants any child as a pupil of any public or private elementary or secondary school, child care center, day nursery, nursery school, family day care home, or development center, unless prior to his or her admission to that institution he or she has been fully immunized against various diseases, including measles,…

    • 713 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder that affects many organs and impairs the lung function. A blocked chloride transport in the cell membranes creates mucous that has little water content and becomes thick. The thick, sticky mucous causes problems in the lung, pancreas, liver, salivary glands, and testes. It is an autosomal recessive trait and the cystic fibrosis gene can be located in chromosome seven. A symptom of cystic fibrosis is very salty-tasting skin and the reason is, is when a person who has cystic fibrosis has very high levels of chloride in their sweat than what a normal person would have.…

    • 436 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Vaccinations Should kids who are not vaccinated be allowed in public or private schools, and should it be mandatory for everyone to be vaccinated? This is a very debated controversial topic. A vaccine is a medicine that supplies immunity against diseases. It is very important that everyone is informed and educated on why they need to be vaccinated.…

    • 1580 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The people living in the 20th century were plagued by a virtually unstoppable disease. Children were infected and sometimes the disease was fatal. The United States had a Poliomyelitis epidemic in the years between 1916 and 1952, which was the peak of the epidemic (Petersen). Polio, as it is more commonly known, caused a great deal of pain, fear, and heartache for these people. It did, however, lead Jonas Salk to create a vaccine that would change the developed world forever.…

    • 931 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Pertussis: Whooping Cough

    • 396 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The disease that I picked was Pertussis also known as “Whooping cough”, it comes from the Latin words “intensive cough”. It causes an inspiration whooping and it also can cause posttussive vomiting, apnea with or without cyanosis, paroxysms of coughing. Pertussis is a very highly contagious disease and can be caught by “direct contact with respiratory droplets from mucus membranes.” (Myra Carmon, 2010 p. 239) Pertussis began in the 1980s, but in 2012 the disease peaked again leaving 48,277 children being treated and 20 deaths.…

    • 396 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    After contracting the disease, symptoms will develop “within five to ten days, but sometimes not for as long as three weeks.” The initial symptoms are similar to the common cold. This stage, called the catarrhal stage, includes a runny nose and a low fever as well as an occasional cough. The catarrhal stage is highly contagious and will last for one to two weeks before developing into the paroxysmal stage. This stage is where pertussis gets its other name, whooping cough.…

    • 1847 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Pertussis Case Studies

    • 355 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Pertussis regularly starts treacherously with chilly like side effects, including runny nose, conceivable poor quality fever and a gentle, bothering hack that continuously progresses toward becoming paroxysmal, more often than not inside 1-2 weeks. Spread through direct contact with respiratory beads, pertussis is most infectious in the beginning times of sickness preceding creating paroxysms (for the most part the initial two weeks).Communicability bit by bit melts away and ends up noticeably irrelevant in around three weeks, although the infectious period can be diminished to five days following viable antibiotic treatment. People with pertussis ought to be disengaged from school, work or similar activities until the point that they have finished no less than five days of a fitting anti-microbial…

    • 355 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Vaccines-calling the shots “You don’t have to cough, you just have to breathe to get the disease because it is airborne and dangerous”. In US approximately 90 percent of parents vaccinate their children and follow recommended schedule which is 28 immunizations to protect against 14 different diseases in their first two years of life. 10 percent of parents either skip or delay some shots and 1 percent don’t vaccinate at all. The reason behind, not vaccinating or delaying or skipping is that parents are scared to inject anything in their child’s body thinking it might harm them and it is reasonable from parents point of view. But today, children are getting sick and dying from preventable disease (like measles, whooping cough) like it happens in third world countries.…

    • 908 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Tuberculosis Essay

    • 2376 Words
    • 10 Pages

    Introduction This report is an overview of the epidemiology of Tuberculosis rates in the United Kingdom between 2004 and 2013. The report is done with the aim to review the trend of Tuberculosis spread in the UK and its impact on morbidity and mortality records, which remains significant to the UK public health system, with huge socioeconomic concerns. Tuberculosis or TB is an infectious disease affecting mainly the lungs, though it generally affects a number of organs in body (Ivany and Boulton, 2014; NHS, 2014).…

    • 2376 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Superior Essays