After a whooping cough outbreak killed two infants, Louisiana health officials waited months to officially alert physicians or do public outreach. That’s not the typical public health response.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
When there’s an outbreak of an infectious disease, state health officials usually rush to alert doctors and the public about what’s going on. But this year during Louisiana’s worst outbreak of whooping cough in decades, health officials did not appear to follow that playbook. Rosemary Westwood with member station WWNO in New Orleans has this story.
ROSEMARY WESTWOOD, BYLINE: Lots of pediatric residents never see a case of whooping cough during their training. Until this summer, Dr. Madison Flake in Baton Rouge was one of them.
MADISON FLAKE: I was helping cover our inpatient service, and we actually had to send a little baby to the ICU.
WESTWOOD: The baby was less than 2 months old, and he was having trouble breathing she says.
FLAKE: Then he would have these bouts of very dramatic, like, coughing spells, and after that, he would stop breathing for several seconds to almost a minute.
WESTWOOD: Whooping cough is also called pertussis. It’s highly contagious and can even be deadly for the youngest babies. Louisiana’s outbreak began last fall. By February of this year, two babies had died. But the Louisiana Department of Health waited two months to post something on social media. It took even longer to alert physicians and hold a press conference to suggest people talk to their doctors about getting vaccinated. Dr. Georges Benjamin says that lag is surprising.
GEORGES BENJAMIN: Particularly for these childhood diseases, we usually jump all over these. You know, these are preventable diseases and preventable deaths.
WESTWOOD: Benjamin is the executive director of the American Public Health Association. Dr. Abraar Karan is an infectious disease specialist who’s worked on COVID and mpox outbreaks. He agrees a sense of urgency is key.
ABRAAR KARAN: Time is perhaps one of the most important currencies that you have.
WESTWOOD: He says infectious diseases spread exponentially, so if you don’t alert the public quickly, you lose a key chance to prevent further infections, illnesses and possibly deaths. Karan believes that by not acting more quickly, the Louisiana Health Department may have set itself up for a worse outbreak.
KARAN: Because then what we see is this train wreck thereafter of, like, an insanely large outbreak, a lot of hospitalizations.
WESTWOOD: This was Louisiana’s largest pertussis outbreak in 35 years. The majority of people hospitalized for it were children under the age of 1, and about 75% of the hospitalized patients weren’t up to date on their whooping cough vaccine. Infants can get the vaccine when they’re 2 months old. In February, after the two infants died, Louisiana’s surgeon general, Dr. Ralph Abraham, banned the health department from holding any vaccine events and recommending vaccines generally. In May, Abraham held the first press conference that specifically addressed the pertussis outbreak. Abraham said he thought children should be vaccinated in those cases where the vaccines are, quote, “good.”
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RALPH ABRAHAM: And certainly, in my opinion, in the MMR and the pertussis vaccine, the benefits do outweigh the risk.
WESTWOOD: Hospitalizations for pertussis continued to rise over the summer, but the Louisiana Department of Health did not put out any new public communications. Dr. Benjamin with the American Public Health Association says protecting the public from infectious diseases demands more action.
BENJAMIN: The bottom line is, it’s not too late. What we want to do is we want to prevent dealing with pertussis.
WESTWOOD: Asked for comment, the Louisiana Department of Health referred NPR to a post on X. In it, Surgeon General Abraham said the health department has consistently reported cases of pertussis and provided guidance to help residents stay protected. For NPR News, I’m Rosemary Westwood in New Orleans.
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CHANG: And this story comes from NPR’s partnership with WWNO and KFF Health News.
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