Should we be giving even more shots against pertussis (whooping cough)? A new study is showing that the pertussis vaccine isn t as long-lasting as was originally thought.
The study of more than 400,000 children in Minnesota and Oregon who received all five currently recommended doses of the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis) vaccine found that rates of disease climbed successively each year after their fifth and final vaccination, generally administered between the ages of 4 and 6 years.
After that shot, kids aren t scheduled to get a booster shot until age 11 or 12 but the study suggested that they might need to get one earlier.
You get a little less protected with each additional year, the farther out you are from the vaccination, says vaccine researcher and lead study author Sara Tartof, now of Kaiser Permanente Southern California. (She was at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when she conducted the study, which is published in Pediatrics).
The study confirms earlier work showing that the effects of the DTaP vaccine fade earlier than expected, as we covered in Dispatch back in November. Since then, the CDC has recommended that pregnant women get a pertussis booster shot, and also that older teens and young adults consider getting a booster shot too.
