It may sound like an illness that you thought was wiped out long
ago, but whooping cough is making a comeback from Texas to New England.
(Thanks to Al's Morning Meeting reader Mike Stucka for the tip on this
one.)
In Boston, whooping cough infected one patient and 15 hospital staff members. Sixty more hospital workers are being tested.
I have seen whooping-cough stories from North Carolina, Chicago, Connecticut and Indiana, on the Purdue campus.
In Plano, Texas, students in local schools have symptoms. WFAA-TV reports:
Nationwide, more school-aged children are coming down with whooping
cough. That's why, for the first time, the federal [Department of] Health and Human
Services is now offering a booster to anyone 11-years-old or older.
Whooping cough first presents itself with nasal congestion and
possibly fever. A mild cough can get worse and can last two to three
months. Once patients start taking antibiotics, they are no longer
contagious after five days. Infants are most at risk. Last year in
Texas, eight children died from whooping cough.
FDA (Food and Drug Administration) Consumer magazine points out:
With the number of reported outbreaks of whooping cough (pertussis)
on the rise in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) says there is a need to protect adolescents and
adults, as well as children, against this highly contagious respiratory
infection.
Commonly thought of as a childhood illness, pertussis actually
affects people of all ages. According to the CDC, 5,000 to 7,000 cases
are reported in the United States each year. Moreover, pertussis has
been increasingly reported among adolescents and adults in the last
several years. This is important because those who have a cough may not
realize that they have pertussis and may be the primary source of
infection for infants, who have the greatest risk of dying from the
disease.
While there is no lifelong protection against pertussis,
immunization by vaccine is the best preventive measure available.
Vaccines currently licensed by the Food and Drug Administration to
prevent the disease and reduce related illness and death are available
for children up to age 7, and for adolescents between 10 and 18. The
children's vaccine is part of a routine series of childhood
immunizations called diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP) that
is strongly recommended by the National Immunization Program at the
CDC. It is administered in five doses, given at 2, 4, 6, and 15 to 18
months of age, and between 4 and 6 years. All five doses are
recommended for maximum protection.
The adolescent vaccine, approved in May 2005, has the same
components as the DTaP vaccine for infants and young children, but in
reduced quantities.
Although most infants in the United States are immunized against
pertussis, this immunity usually fades as a person enters adolescence
or early adulthood. Health officials at the CDC say that preventing
transmission of the disease to very young infants is critical because
they are not old enough to be fully immunized. The CDC says that
between 1996 and 2004 the majority of pertussis patients were either
too young to have the required vaccine series or too old to have been
immunized.
Researchers hope to change that. New vaccines, particularly one for
adults, could help to reduce the incidence of pertussis in young
infants as well by decreasing their exposure to the bacteria.
The CDC gives some history and background:
In
the 20th century, pertussis was one of the most common childhood
diseases and a major cause of childhood mortality in the United States.
Before the availability of pertussis vaccine in the 1940s, more than
200,000 cases of pertussis were reported annually. Since widespread use
of the vaccine began, incidence has decreased more than 80 percent compared
with the prevaccine era.
Pertussis remains a major health problem among children in
developing countries, with an estimated 285,000 deaths resulting from
the disease in 2001.
From Pertussis.com:
What Are the Symptoms?
- Whooping cough usually starts with cold or flu-like symptoms such
as runny nose, sneezing, fever and a mild cough. These symptoms can
last up to two weeks and are followed by increasingly severe coughing
spells. Fever, if present, is usually mild.
- During a classic cough episode:
- signature "whoop" is heard as the patient struggles to breathe
- coughs usually produce a thick, productive mucus
- vomiting may occur
- lips and nails may turn blue due to lack of oxygen
- patient is left exhausted after the coughing spell
- Mild pertussis disease is difficult to diagnose because its
symptoms mimic those of a cold. Usually a prolonged cough is present,
but without the "whoop."
- Milder symptoms usually affect all age groups, but are increasing among school children.
- The coughing attacks may last for many months in the "classic illness" or just a few days in the mild form of the disease.
- Symptoms appear between six and 21 days (average seven to 10) after exposure to the bacteria.
Below are sound-file pages so you can hear what whooping cough sounds like. (A note from Al: I cannot attest to the authenticity of these files, but
they come from the Web site of Dr. Doug Jenkinson, who says he is a
family physician in London.)
Bad Girls
The New York Daily News
takes note of a local story that has national implications. While crime
among boys is dropping, crime among girls is rising -- a lot. One has to
note that girls still represent a significant minority of the total
number of people arrested, however. In 2004, the FBI said girls now account for 29 percent of all juvenile arrests, up from 23 percent in 1990.
The Daily News says:
Experts blamed the spike among girls on many things, from increases
in family violence and female aggression to violent images in the
media.
"There is a lot of victimization leading to this," said Citizens' Committee for Children's Gail Nayowith.
"Whether physical, sexual or emotional," she said, "[it] can sometimes be the first step to lead them to delinquency."
Other advocates say the rise could be partially because authorities
and parents are more willing to prosecute young females than in decades
past.
"Before we would have called them incorrigible," said Meda Chesney-Lind, author of "Beyond Bad Girls" and a criminologist at the University of Hawaii. "Now we're relabeling them and detaining them."
Dr. Herbert Mandell, medical director for the charity KidsPeace, blamed a "breakdown in some of the supports in the community and home."
He told the Daily News, "Girls just aren't getting the kind of
protection from dad, older brother, siblings and schools as they used
to, and that's very sad."
Media images of aggressive women, like Angelina Jolie's characters
in "Tomb Raider" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," may also fuel combative
behavior.
"Anybody who grows up with a television at home sees more violence
... than I did growing up," said Heather Nicholson, research director
of Girls Inc.
The Christian Science Monitor in 2004 said there are other possible reasons for the uptick in crime involving girls:
- Relabelling: Behavior that was once categorized as a status
offense -- such as running away from home, scuffling with family
members, truancy and repeated discipline problems -- is now sometimes
put in the violent offenses category.
- "Upcriming": Zero-tolerance policies in schools have turned minor
offenses that once might have been dealt with informally into
arrestable crimes with more severe penalties.
- Rediscovery: Awareness is growing in the media and among
policymakers of girls' violence, which was always there but largely
ignored, since the juvenile justice system has traditionally been
geared toward boys. (Self-report studies show that girls commit many
more offenses than show up in official arrest stats.)
"Until relatively recently, girls' aggression was trivialized,
minimalized, ignored," says Dr. Shari Miller-Johnson, a senior research
scientist with the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke
University. "People really didn't pay any attention to it."
Girls have been overlooked as instigators
of violence, adds Dr.
Erika Karres, an education researcher in Chapel Hill, N.C., because
society thought only boys could be violent. Girls' meanness and
bullying are just now being reported. One reason, she says, is that
"girls' violence is not as obvious and in your face as it is from boys.
You don't see too many second-grade girls punching each other out."
Why Do Girls Get Involved in Criminal Activity?
CourtTV says:
In "Good Girls Gone Bad,"
journalist Susan Nadler talked with a variety of women in prison and
found that they tended to fit into one of several categories:
- Acting out or defying an image: People think of you in a certain
way and you want to do something outrageous to prove that you're not
what they think.
- Snapping: While this is a controversial diagnosis, in
ordinary language it means that someone was pushed by events to the
breaking point.
- Being the outlaw: They pursue crime to develop an image that
they perceive as cool or working outside social boundaries. (One woman
with whom Nadler talked had grown up privileged, but by the time she
was 24, "Rosa" had pulled over 500 burglaries, had three men working
for her, and was earning over $200,000 a year.)
- Addiction: Ninety percent of women in prison have substance-abuse problems.
- Following a role model: Especially in gangs, girls who see those they respect committing a crime tend to do the same.
- Keeping someone's attention or affection: Many women who team
up with men get involved in their criminal activities as a way to keep
them romantically involved. They end up in prison for crimes they might
not otherwise have done.
- Obsession: Some women develop a fixation that involves crossing legal boundaries.
- Justification by the act of others: They did it and so can I.
Fantasy Congress
I can't imagine what kind of life you would have to lead to play
this, but there are now at least two versions of "Fantasy Congress," an election
game that sort of works like fantasy football:
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting
is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials
from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis.
When the information comes directly from another source, it will be
attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is
fact-checked, but depends upon the accuracy and integrity of the
original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.
It's ironic none of these stories call to account or...
