Pregnant women, between 28 and 38 weeks, are now being offered a whooping cough vaccine.
The combined whooping cough vaccine adds four more diseases against which protection is being offered to the newborn child via its mother.
Children are offered a whooping cough vaccine at two, three and four months of age as part of the routine childhood vaccination programme.
The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine has been failing us, because immunity against it fades.
In the 1970s, fears that whooping-cough vaccine might cause brain damage led to a decline in vaccine cover and an increase in outbreaks of the disease.
The US has been offering a combined whooping cough, tetanus and diphtheria vaccine to pregnant women for the past 18 months.
There is no single vaccine against whooping cough, so the jab being offered to pregnant women will also protect against diphtheria, tetanus and polio.
The childhood vaccine for whooping cough has not been raised as a possible cause of autism, and the vaccines that were concerning have been shown not to cause autism with substantial evidence, said Stacey Martin, a staff epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who works on pertussis.
And make no mistake about it: if measles, whooping cough, polio, and other vaccine-preventable diseases return, children will die.
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Here are some facts: pre-vaccination, whooping cough caused 9000 deaths per year in the U.S. Post-vaccine, this has dropped to 20 deaths per year.
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So we can thank NVIC and other anti-vaccine groups, such as Generation Rescue (which claims, among many other mistaken notions, t hat the pertussis vaccine causes autism), for the re-emergence of whooping cough.
Prof Adam Finn, a paediatrician and vaccine expert from Bristol Children's Hospital has treated many babies with whooping cough.
According to Forbes contributor Steven Salzberg, a whooping cough epidemic in California that has killed nine babies may be the result of the burgeoning anti-vaccine movement.
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