The total of 1,008 reported as of April 21 is more than reported in all of 2011 and is the highest number of cases since 1,026 were reported in all of 2005.

At this rate, the state is on track to reach more than 3,000 cases for the year; levels that haven’t been seen in more than six decades, officials said.

“We’re very concerned about the risk to infants, especially because of how quickly whooping cough is spreading,” said Secretary of Health, Mary Selecky. “Whooping cough can be life threatening for infants, and they’re too young to get enough doses of vaccine to be protected. That’s why we want everyone else to make sure they’re vaccinated against whooping cough.”

Already this year 71 infants under a year old have been reported to have whooping cough. Eighteen of them have been hospitalized. No babies have died in 2012, but two babies died in 2010 and two in 2011.

Whooping Cough (Pertussis)

Pertussis, the whooping cough bacteria -- CDC photo

Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, is a highly contagious respiratory illness spread by coughing and sneezing.

It is caused by a bacteria called Bordetella pertussis. The name, pertussis, comes from Latin, from per-‘away, extremely’ + Latin tussis ‘a cough.’

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventing, in the 20th century,  pertussis was one of the most common childhood diseases and a major cause of child death in the United States.

Initially, an infection may seem like just a cold. However, during this phase of the infection, which can last several weeks, a person can spread the disease to others.

Patients typically then go on to develop a severe, persistent–often wracking–cough that can last for several more weeks.

The coughing fits can be prolonged and are often followed by a long inhalation that causes the “whooping” sound that gives the disease its name.

The bouts of coughing can leave victims breathless and unable to eat, drink or sleep. Complications of the infection include pneumonia, seizures and death.

Whooping cough can affect people of all ages — but is most serious in infants, especially those too young to get vaccinated or who aren’t fully protected.

There is a vaccine that can prevent infection, but it is not effective in newborns or infants and it wears off with time.

Many cases in the current epidemic are being reported in school age children. The vaccine that young children get wears off over time, so all children age 11-12 should get a whooping cough booster shot, called Tdap, health officials said.

The Tdap vaccine is also recommended for pregnant women and women who recently gave birth.

Getting vaccinated before giving birth helps prevent the mother from spreading the illness to her newborn.

The Department of Health has release a public service announcement featuring Chelsey Charles, a mother whose 27-week-old infant  Kaliah died of whooping cough last year.

“It devastated our family,” Chelsey Charles says. “Don’t wait; go get your Tdap shot before it’s too late for somebody else.”

“This is what we’re trying to prevent,” says Dr. Maxine Hayes, State Health Officer. “When adults get sick with whooping cough it can be miserable, but when babies get the disease, they often must be hospitalized because it’s difficult for them to feed, sleep, and breathe.”

Selecky and Hayes urge all teens and adults to check their immunization status. Many health care providers use the state’s immunization registry and can check which vaccines have been given.

Most health insurance carriers cover the whooping cough vaccine; adults should double check with their health plan.

Whooping cough vaccines are available to all Washington children under 19 years old through health care provider offices participating in the state’s Childhood Vaccine Program.

More information on whooping cough disease and who should be vaccinated is available on Department of Health’s website (www.doh.wa.gov).

The number of reported cases is updated every Tuesday afternoon.

Free vaccine available

John Wecker

Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute (PNDRI) announced today that John Wecker, PhD has been appointed president and CEO.

Dr. Wecker was most recently Global Program Leader, Vaccine Access and Delivery at PATH.

PNDRI is an independent non-profit biomedical and clinical research center that focuses on eliminating diabetes and its complications.

The Institute, which has a team of 85 physicians, scientists and technical staff, was founded in Seattle in 1956 by Dr. William Hutchinson, Sr., who also founded the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Before he joined PATH, Dr. Wecker worked for Boehringer Ingelheim, a global pharmaceutical company, where he led pharmaceutical product development teams and championed the company’s efforts to expand access to treatments for HIV/AIDS in the developing world.

During this time he established a program to provide medication for the prevention of mother-child transmission of HIV/AIDS, free of charge to over 120 countries around the world.

Dr. Wecker received his doctorate in Biological Psychology from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.

Dr. Wecker succeeds Dr. Jack Faris, who has been serving as acting CEO during the past eighteen months. Dr. Faris will remain part of the PNDRI team as a strategic advisor.

Dr. Wecker will begin at PNDRI on April 23^rd.

To learn more:

• For more information about PNDRI, visit www.pndri.org or call (206) 726-1200.

Hookworm (Photo: CDC)

By Katherine Kahn, Contributing Writer
Health Behavior News Service

Purposely infecting patients with hookworms or whipworms to treat hay fever and other immune-related diseases has been experimented with since the 1970s.

A new review by The Cochrane Library concludes that current evidence doesn’t yet support the use of this therapy.

However, worm therapy does appear to be safe, the review’s lead author says.

“Allergic diseases affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide, especially in industrialized countries,” says review author Ashley Croft, M.D., a public health physician at the headquarters of the Surgeon General, Whittington Barracks, in Lichfield, UK. “Existing treatments for allergies, which mostly involve pharmacotherapy, are often expensive, dangerous, or ineffective. If worm therapy can be shown to be effective and safe, it will represent an important new clinical option for treatment.”

Croft theorizes that worm therapy might work if having intestinal worms “‘tones up’ the immune system of their human hosts, so that the host stops being over-responsive to common allergens. This helps the worms avoid detection and destruction by the host’s immune system.”

“It’s generally appreciated that in the 20th century a whole series of immunological diseases have emerged out of nowhere,” Weinstock explains, including hay fever, asthma, inflammatory bowel diseases, and multiple sclerosis. “Why did these diseases emerge? If you look around the world, these diseases are fairly common in industrialized countries, but in less developed countries, they are relatively rare.”

 Key Points

• Since the 1970s, worm therapy has been used as an alternative treatment for hay fever under the assumption that it might calm overactive immune systems.

• No long-term studies have been conducted to demonstrate that worm therapy relieves hay fever symptoms.

• An evidence review of available studies of worm therapy shows no benefit for hay fever sufferers, and that while safe it may cause minor digestive problems.

The cause, Weinstock believes, is the tremendous improvement in hygiene—and that includes lack of exposure to intestinal worms, such as hookworms and whipworms. “Up until the 20th century, everybody had worms,” Weinstock says.

The lack of worm infections in modern societies, Weinstock conjectures, has led to over-reactive immune systems and an increase in immune-related diseases.

Croft’s review examined evidence from two placebo-controlled, double blinded studies that enrolled a total of 130 adults who had either intermittent or persistent allergic rhinitis.

One study used hookworm larvae, which enter through the skin and travel to the intestines and the other study used pig whipworm eggs that participants swallowed.

Participants who used worm therapy had no reduction in hay fever symptoms or percentage of days when symptoms were minimal. They also had no changes in lung function or quality of life scores.

Croft cautions that these studies are too small to truly evaluate effectiveness. “It did come as a surprise, therefore, that we found that people with allergic rhinitis who took worms were less likely to have to take tablets as rescue medication during the grass pollen season.”

Weinstock also says that the studies to date haven’t been designed very well and says it was surprising researchers found any response at all since the study follow-up times were too short.

“To treat an allergy, you probably have to have a treatment strategy that’s at least six months long,” before evaluating effectiveness, he says. The studies ran for only three months and six months, respectively, after initiating worm therapy.

“Our main finding was that worm therapy is safe,” says Croft. “In participants who took worms there were some gastrointestinal side effects, such as abdominal pain and diarrhea, but these were transient and were not so severe as to cause people to drop out of the trials.”

Croft says that there is enough evidence to support continued research in worm therapy. “Clinical trials in worm therapy are not expensive to run and the potential benefits from this new form of therapy are very great,” he says.

Health Behavior News Service is part of the Center for Advancing Health

The Health Behavior News Service disseminates news stories on the latest findings from peer-reviewed research journals. HBNS covers both new studies and systematic reviews of studies on (1) the effects of behavior on health, (2) health disparities data and (3) patient engagement research. The goal of HBNS stories is to present the facts for readers to understand and use for themselves to make informed choices about health and health care.

Dr. Larry Corey

Dr. Larry Corey, M.D., president and director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Academy is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy-research centers.

The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Dr. Corey has led the Hutchinson Center since January 2011 and has held other leadership positions there since 1996, first as head of infectious disease sciences in the Clinical Research Division and later as senior vice president and co-director of the Center’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division.

Dr. Corey is an expert in virology, immunology and vaccine development. His research has focused on herpes viruses, HIV and other viral infections, particularly those associated with cancer.

He also is principal investigator of the Hutchinson Center-based HIV Vaccine Trials Network, an international collaboration of scientists and institutions that combines clinical trials and laboratory-based studies to accelerate the development of HIV vaccines.

Dr. Corey is a professor of laboratory medicine and medicine, adjunct professor of pediatrics and microbiology, and holder of the Lawrence Corey Endowed Chair in Medical Virology at the University of Washington. He is also an infectious disease physician at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Dr. Corey is the Hutchinson Center’s second president to be elected to the Academy. Yeast geneticist Lee Hartwell, Ph.D., a 2001 Nobel laureate, was elected in 1998. He led the Center from 1997 until 2010.

Corey is among 220 leaders in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, business and public affairs who have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2012 class of fellows.

Since its founding in 1780, the Academy fellows have included: George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth.

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony Oct. 6 at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Flu virus - courtesy of NAIAD

The flu season has begun late this year in Washington state, but a recent uptick in cases indicate that the bug has arrived, Washington State Department of Health officials said Thursday.

Influenza season usually runs from November to March, peaking in mid-February in Washington state, but this year the season is off to a slow start.

Infection is common: Each year, about  5 to 20 percent of Americans come down with the flu, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),

Flu symptoms can resemble those of a cold but tend to be more severe, typically causing fever, cough, sore throat, muscle aches, headaches, and fatigue.

Although the vast majority of people recover from the flu, more than 200,000 Americans require hospitalization and about 36,000 die from the infection or its complications, such as a secondary pneumonias, each year.

Most healthy adults can spread the flu before they know they’re sick and for up to seven days after.

Children are two to three times more likely than adults to get sick and are more likely to spread the infection to others.

To avoid spreading the flu, people should wash their hands, cover their cough, and stay home if they’re sick, health officials said.

There is, however, still time to prevent infection by getting vaccinated, Washington state health officials said.

Who should get vaccinated?

Washington State health officials recommend a flu shot each year for everyone six months and older.

Pregnant women are at particularly high-risk of severe complications from flu infections. Vaccination not only can protect them, it also provides some protection for their child after birth.

Some children under age nine may need two doses about four weeks apart to be fully protected, they noted.

For more information about who is at risk and for who vaccination is most important go to www.flu.gov.

Treatment with antiviral drugs

• If you’re sick with flu, antiviral medications can lessen symptoms and help prevent serious complications. They work best when started quickly.

• People at high risk for complications who develop flu-like symptoms should contact their doctor promptly to see if they need medication.

• Those at high risk include people with certain medical conditions, pregnant women and women who recently gave birth, young children, and people 65 years and older.

Flu season is gaining momentum at a time when whooping cough is already very active in many communities in our state, sate health officials noted. Anyone can get whooping cough but it is most serious for infants.

All teens and adults should get a whooping cough booster, called Tdap vaccine, to help stop the spread of this disease and protect babies, they said.

To learn more:

• Go to Flu.gov

To find an immunization clinic:

• Call your healthcare provider,
• visit a local pharmacy,
• use the Department of Health Flu News website
• or call the Family Health Hotline at 1-800-322-2588.

The Flu Vaccine Finder is also a good resource.