Whooping cough hits three Issaquah schools
Published 3:53 pm Friday, March 13, 2015
The Issaquah School District reported in a letter to parents and staff Friday that students at Issaquah High School, Pacific Cascade Middle School and Grandridge Elementary School had been diagnosed with pertussis.
Multiple students at Issaquah High and Pacific Cascade had been diagnosed, while only one student had been diagnosed at Grandridge.
The district is working closely with King County Public Health in light of the diagnoses. The agency’s fact sheet on pertussis has been made available on the district website.
Eileen Benoiel, a registered nurse with the health agency’s Communicable Disease Epidemiology and Immunization Section, published a timeline of when the students were at school while potentially contagious. That range was Jan. 30 to March 11 at Issaquah High and March 9 to March 12 at Pacific Cascade.
Pertussis is a highly contagious bacterial infection, also known as “whooping cough” or “the 100 day cough.” Symptoms, which include a violent cough that can leave the sufferer gasping for air, can persist for as long as 10 weeks, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The condition is dangerous, especially to infants — about half of children younger than 1 who contract pertussis are hospitalized.
The first vaccine was made available in the 1940s, leading to an unsteady but massive reduction in incidences of the disease in the United States in the subsequent decades. However, recorded cases of pertussis have risen since the 1980s. In 2012, 48,277 cases of pertussis were reported, the most since 1955.
