Whooping Cough Reopened

Two-thirds of all U.S. deaths from whooping cough in 1938-40 were of babies less than one year old; nearly half of these died before the age of seven months. Yet the medical profession, which is by no means immune to unproved dogma, has long assumed that infants of less than seven months should not be immunized against whooping cough; the vaccine is supposed to have little or no effect.

Drs. Wallace Saburo Sako and Waldo Louis Treuting of New Orleans, and Public Health Service Surgeons David Burton Witt and Samuel Julian Nichamin were skeptical of this settled notion. Investigating, they found no one had clearly proved it. They proceeded to inoculate 3,793 two-to-twelve-week-old babies in New Orleans clinics. Sure enough, two to four months after the inoculations, laboratory tests indicated moderate or strong immunity in about 80% of the little patients. And the babies had fewer bad reactions to inoculation than older patients do.

Presenting these facts in last week's Journal of the A.M.A., the New Orleans researchers took a mild poke at medical complacency: "The question of early immunization against pertussis [whooping cough] should be reopened."

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