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An extra whooping cough vaccination for babies comes as a result of work by researchers at the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases.
Research by The Kids Research Institute Australia will soon ensure young children are better protected against whooping cough.
Governments should rethink strategies to prevent whooping cough in newborn infants, including booster vaccination of close contacts of the baby.
Vaccination is the injection of an inactivated bacteria or virus into the body. This simulated infection allows an individual's immune system to develop an adaptive immunity for protection against that type of illness. When a sufficiently large percentage of a population has been vaccinated, this results in herd immunity.
The Infectious Disease Implementation Research Team is a multi-disciplinary group researching the best way to implement infectious disease prevention and treatment strategies to improve the wellbeing of children and teenagers.
Immunisation is the most effective way of protecting your child against a range of serious illnesses, including measles, hepatitis B and whooping cough. All vaccines used in Australia undergo stringent testing and ongoing monitoring.
We compared the effect of a heterologous wP/aP/aP primary series (hereafter mixed wP/aP) versus a homologous aP/aP/aP primary schedule (hereafter aP-only) on antibody responses to co-administered vaccine antigens in infants and toddlers.
Evidence suggests that children who had received an initial priming dose of whole-cell pertussis (wP) vaccine, rather than acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine, had a lower risk of developing IgE-mediated food allergy, the most common cause of anaphylaxis-related hospital presentations of childhood.
Whooping cough (pertussis) is a highly contagious respiratory infection which causes a severe cough and can be particularly dangerous to babies under a year old. Vaccination is the best way to reduce the risk of whooping cough.
Asthma is among the commonest noncommunicable diseases of childhood and often occurs with other atopic comorbidities. A previous case-control study found evidence that compared to children who received acellular pertussis (aP) vaccines in early infancy, children who received one or more doses of whole-cell pertussis (wP) vaccine had lower risk of developing IgE-mediated food allergy. We hypothesized that wP vaccination in early infancy might protect against atopic asthma in childhood.