The RIVM warns of an outbreak of whooping cough. In November and December, around 600 cases were recorded per month. There are now about 250 cases per week. This time last year there were only ten cases in the entire month. And that is worrying, because the disease can be dangerous, especially in babies under one year of age. In exceptional cases even fatal.
RTL News spoke to two mothers who, through their own experiences, call on (future) mothers to have themselves and their children vaccinated against whooping cough.
Bottle not empty
“He was really a bright spot,” says Mirjam. Her mother had died suddenly a few months before Tom’s birth, so Tom’s arrival was very welcome.
Things went very well for two weeks. He was drinking well, his heart was beating as it should and there was nothing strange going on. Until March 3, when he started drinking less. He also slept a lot. But right when the doctor came to check on Tom, the little boy was “super alert” and just seemed like a very healthy baby.
There is no real treatment for whooping cough, but vaccinations can reduce the problems. That is how it works:
Mirjam’s husband had severe coughing fits around that time. Whooping cough later turned out, but at the time it was thought that it was just a bad cold. In any case, the link with Tom was not made. Not even when the boy skipped an entire bottle the evening after the doctor’s visit. “He suddenly deteriorated really quickly,” says Mirjam. “Then I started to panic quite a bit.”
To the hospital
The next morning, Mirjam took Tom to the doctor again. He then looked a bit yellowish and was referred to the hospital. Tom had too little oxygen. At that time, on March 5, the link with whooping cough was still not made.
A day later, Tom got even worse. He had to go by ambulance to the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen. “That was very intense. Such a baby on a stretcher, between the equipment and machines,” says Mirjam. The morning after, clarity finally came: whooping cough. The boy was put on a heart-lung machine and given new blood.
“In the end there was nothing more that could be done,” says Mirjam. Tom passed away on March 9, 2020. He was not even three weeks old. “He just had a lot of bad luck, with everything.”
Weird rattle
Laura Klip can talk about it. Her son Tygho already had ‘a strange snoring’ at birth in 2019. “No one knew what it was,” she says. Midwives told her it was part of it. But when he started drinking less and started coughing, they rushed to the doctor. The doctor thought it was a cold virus. They were allowed to go home again.
Tygho began to ‘flag his nose’. Babies then flare their nostrils wide to get air. “He became more short of breath,” says Laura. So they went to the doctor again. Once again they were sent home.
At night the boy had trouble breathing. The third visit to the doctor ended with an admission to the hospital. In the hospital, the RS virus was suspected, which has many similarities with whooping cough. “But he became increasingly ill and short of breath,” says Laura. “He was completely blue and couldn’t breathe for a while. It was so bad that we almost had to resuscitate him.”
Wrong stuff
It was wrong. Tygho was breathing too quickly and his heart rate increased. After a week in the hospital, he was transferred to the UMCG in Groningen. There he was put on a ventilator. It was the intensive care providers who ultimately concluded that it was whooping cough.
Tygho was in intensive care for four weeks. He was kept asleep for three and a half weeks of that. He received a blood exchange transfusion three times, during which all his blood was replaced with donor blood. All this time, Laura and her family lived between hope and fear. “Whooping cough is a silent killer.”
The doctors told Laura that it was a miracle that the boy, now 5 years old and healthy under the circumstances, survived. He was given oxygen for another two years and had to be tube fed for six months. “It was very intense. Our child could die at any time for a month.”
Vaccinate
The RIVM advises pregnant women to get the 22-week shot. This injection, which, as the name suggests, is given at 22 weeks of pregnancy, protects babies against whooping cough from birth. It was not yet common practice to get the shot during the pregnancies of both Mirjam and Laura, which is why Laura, to her great regret, was not vaccinated and Mirjam only received the vaccination just before Tom’s birth due to various circumstances.
Both mothers agree on one thing: all parents should get their children (and themselves) vaccinated. “If you choose not to have your child – even if he or she is 7 or 10 years old – vaccinated, it means that the disease has a chance and can become worse,” says Mirjam. “Next week Tom would have turned 4. That remains painful.”
Vaccination against whooping cough
With a whooping cough vaccination during pregnancy (the 22-week injection), a baby is protected against whooping cough immediately after birth. This protection lasts for a number of months, which is why it is important to also give the baby the vaccinations from the national vaccination program. The whooping cough vaccination during pregnancy is a DPT (diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus) vaccination, which also protects against diphtheria and tetanus.
The DPT vaccination prevents whooping cough infection in 9 out of 10 babies under 3 months of age.
Bron: RIVM
2024-02-14 17:42:56
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