Whooping-Cough Prevention

No. 1 killer of U.S. babies is whooping cough, which takes a heavier toll than scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles and infantile paralysis combined. Last week, doctors at the American Medical Association meeting in Atlantic City heard reports on 1) a new way to prevent the disease in newborn infants; 2) the serious mental effects of whooping cough.

Prenatal Vaccination. Newborn infants have a natural immunity to many infectious diseases, but they cannot be vaccinated against whooping cough before the age of seven months. Apparent reason: their bodies are incapable of producing the antibodies.

Drs. Philip Cohen and Samuel Jerome Scadron of Manhattan told how they solved this grave problem by vaccinating 200 mothers in the fifth or sixth month of pregnancy. About 150 billion whooping-cough germs were given to the mothers in injections at two-week intervals. The mothers developed antibodies in their blood streams, passed them on through the umbilical cord to their babies. The inoculations had no effect upon pregnancy or delivery.

Damaged Brains. In Cincinnati's Child Guidance Home, Drs. Louis Aryan Lurie and Sol Levy studied 58 children aged ten and eleven, who had come down with whooping cough in early infancy. Of these children, 34, or more than 58%, showed definite changes in behavior, personality and intelligence later in life-apparently, said the doctors, "as a direct result of this infection."

A "striking and characteristic finding" in these children was a delay in walking and talking; some of them had already started, but stopped after they had whooping cough. Others had convulsions, deafness, speech defects, subnormal intelligence. The incidence of mental deficiency, said the doctors, was much larger in this group of children than in the entire home.

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