“You infect 90% of the people around you, so you infect nine out of 10 people.” This high risk of infection is compounded by the fact that pertussis has a long incubation period. Although the average time is 7-10 days, it can be up to three weeks and during this time, whooping cough is highly contagious. “Once it appears in the family, it is very difficult for you to isolate yourself from that individual, moreover, when it comes down to it and you have symptoms, it is clear that the person in question has gone through the three-week incubation period between which he became infected the others, that is, the contagiousness is significant and in the first phase you don’t even know that it is pertussis,” he explained the speed of spread of this bacterial disease.
Antibiotic treatment is available in the Czech Republic for whooping cough. However, Smejkal also emphasized that the sooner treatment is started, the better: “With antibiotics, we can influence the transmission of infection and reduce symptoms, but they no longer have such a significant effect on cough.”
A hundred-day cough and bleeding in the eyes
Symptoms of pertussis begin similarly to a common respiratory illness, with a runny nose, conjunctivitis, and fever. However, in the next stage it starts to dominate a strong cough, which is manifested by characteristic croaking and paroxysmal episodes. „ Those people cough, it’s called a hundred-day cough, and it often strikes you that the cough lasts a long time,” described one of the dominant symptoms of this disease. “I remember a case where a nurse even had bleeding in the conjunctiva, because the coughing increases the intrathoracic pressure, the pressure in the blood vessels increases, and bleeding appeared in the eyes.” described Smejkal and added other possible complications caused by coughing fits, such as hernias, or hernias, protrusions or lack of oxygen.
Long-term consequences of pertussis are not common, except for severe cases in young children: “The course is difficult in young children, they can have neurological symptoms such as epileptic seizures, so-called encephalopathy or lung damage, or even pneumothorax, when sometimes even rib fractures can occur during the coughing. But we won’t scare you. These are really exceptional complications, but we have to mention them,” said the doctor, adding that these complications can even result in death.
Vaccination is an effective form of prevention available in the Czech Republic. Smejkal would recommend renewing this after ten years, similar to vaccination against tetanus.
