You never get over losing your child to this insidious disease
As whooping cough cases steadily rise, the bereaved mother of a baby who died calls on pregnant women to get the jab...
THERE’S a cough going round that paediatricians tell me is making babies really unwell. What’s deeply worrying is that some very young babies have even died from it - five in England so far this year. The cough is whooping cough — or pertussis.
This is an illness that can be prevented, or its impact reduced, by vaccination.
But there’s been a major surge in cases recently: you may have heard people complaining about the 100-day cough. I’ve had it (and ended up in A&E when I couldn’t breathe) and wrote about it for Mail Online.
Ireland is experiencing its first spike in cases of the disease in over a decade - figures show there were 79 cases of the disease reported in the year up to May 5 in Ireland, compared to just two in the same period in 2023. And 35 of the cases this year have been reported in children under the age of five.
These figures may be a significant underestimate, as people with mild disease may not see a doctor. Dr Ronny Cheung, a consultant paediatrician from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, says: ‘There’s no doubt we’ve been seeing quite a lot more of it on the wards and A&E in recent times.
‘My suspicion is we’re probably still underestimating the true prevalence at the moment.’
WHILE adults describe it as the worst cough they’ve ever had — causing difficulty breathing, incontinence and even fractured ribs — it can be fatal in babies.
The HSE has said complications from whooping cough can lead to fatalities, with two in 1,000 people dying from pneumonia or brain damage. Their white blood cells also increase, sometimes reaching very high levels, causing the blood vessels to clog up, and causing cardiac failure. Almost all deaths are in children under six months old.
Whooping cough is a highly infectious bacterial infection, but those under three months are most at risk because they’re too young to be vaccinated.
The first dose of the pertussis vaccine is normally given at two months, which is why pregnant women are offered the jab between 16 and 32 weeks as the antibodies pass across the placenta and protect the baby in the first few months of life.
Babies died every year before this vaccination programme was introduced.
‘Most of our admissions are still in the pre-immunisation under-threemonth group,’ says Dr Cheung.
‘I’ve seen these babies in my practice where they come with coughing bouts, apnoea [pauses in breathing] or looking very dusky [i.e. blue] or desaturating [with low oxygen levels], and that’s very worrying.’
Danielle Knox knows just how terrifying this can be. Her then seven-week old son Tom was admitted to hospital for a week in December with a severe cough and episodes of apnoea. He was treated with antibiotics and needed regular suctioning.
As Danielle, 33, a health sciences lecturer, told me last week, because Tom didn’t have a ‘whoop’ sound, he wasn’t tested for pertussis; but very young babies do not have the typical ‘whoop’. Other children need multiple readmissions for it.
‘I had a patient who was admitted for the third time in six weeks — they’re still having blue spells at night,’ explains Dr Cheung.
Airfinity, a disease-forecasting company, says ‘the risk of infections is expected to remain elevated in the coming weeks’.
One of the problems is low rates of vaccination, and lack of awareness means the disease continues to spread.
Dr Denis McCauley, Donegal GP and Irish Medical Organisation president, said the vaccine available to pregnant women was a vital way to protect their children.
He said ‘vaccine drift’ had led to lower numbers of people getting the jab for themselves and their children, and had led to the higher rates of whooping cough.
He said vaccines had come to be seen as optional towards the end of the pandemic, when people were offered the Covid boosters if they wanted them. Misinformation and ‘nonsense’ on social media against vaccines also had to be countered by doctors, who were ready to give accurate advice to anyone who wanted it, he said.
He told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘I remember years ago, before the vaccine became common, people used to say they would have the whooping cough for 40 days and 40 nights… It remains a very serious disease for babies of less than one year, and particularly less than six months.
‘If pregnant women take the vaccine, it will protect their babies for two months, and couples who are expecting a child must have a discussion about whether the mother will have the vaccine, and whether they will vaccinate their children.’
The whooping cough vaccine is offered to all children as part of the six-in-one jab at two, four and six months of age. It is also offered at four to five years of age, in the fourin-one vaccine, and in the first year of second-level school (Tdap vaccine).
The immunity from previous vaccination lasts about ten years, so adolescents and adults may get whooping cough again.
For example, Bryony Thomson’s ten-year-old daughter had whooping cough, leaving her unable to breathe. The family moved a mattress into the bathroom so she could sleep there with the hot water running during the night — the steam gave relief. By the first week in January, Bryony’s daughter was coughing four times a minute and was taken to A&E in the middle of the night. ‘She was gasping for air and started to turn blue. I was really frightened.’
One doctor told Bryony that her daughter would be fine and that ‘nobody dies of whooping cough these days’.
Fortunately Bryony’s daughter recovered.
But Riley Hughes was an otherwise healthy baby when he died from whooping cough, aged just 32 days, in 2015.
At three weeks old, he’d developed a mild cold and occasional cough. A doctor reassured his parents, Catherine and
Greg, he was fine. But Riley was sleepy and not waking for feeds, so they took him to hospital.
He was admitted and diagnosed with pertussis. His condition quickly deteriorated and he was put on life support.
‘I wish I could remember the last time I saw Riley conscious,’ Catherine tells me. ‘I just have no memory of looking into his eyes for the last time.’
She’d gone home to rest (she’d been in hospital for four days with virtually no sleep and was exhausted), not realising time was so short.
But Greg was there for their son’s last conscious hours.
‘Riley was screaming and screaming. He would have been in a lot of pain from the needles and cannulas they were administering. That’s how my baby will last remember the world,’ she says.
At 3am she got an urgent call from Greg telling her: ‘The doctors say you’ve got to come in, quickly.’
‘Riley was placed in my arms — I was shocked at how burning hot and swollen his tiny body was,’ says Catherine, who has two other children, from Perth, Australia.
‘The tubes were removed, and we cuddled, cried, kissed him, and sang to him a lullaby as the life slowly drained out of him. At 2pm, our beautiful baby left us, left this world, and left us devastated and heartbroken.
‘If I had been offered a whooping cough booster during pregnancy, there is a good chance Riley would still be with us today.’
But when Catherine was pregnant, it was before Australia offered the maternal pertussis vaccine. Days after Riley’s death the vaccine programme began, resulting in a significant reduction in babies hospitalised with pertussis.
‘It’s bittersweet — I’m overjoyed that we have these fantastic pregnancy vaccination programmes, but really sad they weren’t implemented in time for Riley,’ says Catherine, who now campaigns to encourage women to be vaccinated.
DR Niall Conroy, a physician and adjunct professor of public health at University College Cork, said on social media: ‘We are now seeing lots of whooping cough in Ireland too.
‘Small babies can and do die from it. The vaccine is safe and effective. It’s important to keep small babies safe. That should be all we need to say.’
This is what drives Catherine. ‘In every case I’ve heard of, where parents lost their babies to this insidious disease, they did not have, or weren’t offered, a vaccine during pregnancy.
‘Their stories are harrowing. You never “get over” losing your child in this way and you never forget the terrifying sound of the cough that took your child’s life.’
Current medical advice is if infected, avoid close contact with those at higher risk of serious illness (babies, elderly people and anyone who is immunocompromised). If you have to go out, wear a mask.
‘Something I hotly denied until after he died in 2020, when I felt so depressed I could barely do anything for a month.’
AS bright young things of the Sixties, the Conrans enjoyed a ‘vibrant, exciting’ time in London, socialising with Shirley’s best friend Mary Quant at her iconic shop, Bazaar. ‘Terence and I had a lot of fun together, apart from the infidelities,’ Shirley recalled. ‘But life became just criticise, criticise, criticise from morning to midnight. It was very wearing.’
Two weeks after she walked out, Terence sacked her from her role as design and sales director of Conran Fabrics, leaving her a homeless and jobless single mother.
‘I know only too well the frozen panic when money runs out,’ she wrote of that time.
‘What it’s like to turn off the heating all winter, scold children for not switching off lights and fill up on bread and potatoes, never throwing away leftovers which make the soup thicker.’ She found a job as a designer at the Daily Mail. When divorce proceedings began, the judge denied her alimony on the grounds that she had a job. Terence paid the boys’ school fees and was supposed to provide further support. When he failed to pay, she ran up lawyer’s bills taking him to court. Eventually, she bought the family home from Terence — for three times what he had paid for it — and lived with her sons in London.
She was promoted to the Daily Mail’s homes editor before launching Femail, when her career really took off. She never lost her connection to the Mail and would recall this pivotal moment with great fondness. In an article to mark Femail’s 50th anniversary in 2018, she wrote of the ‘razzle dazzle’ of the launch: ‘The office atmosphere felt a bit ike a modern teenager sleepover. ‘There was a permanent air of exhilaration. We all enjoyed the effortless effervescence, the first joke of the morning, the fashion editor’s decision to print a list of hangover cures.’
Until then, newspapers had only ever included a women’s section about knitting, dress patterns, recipes and the odd interview with charity organisers. In Femail, for the first time, Shirley said: ‘We wrote about our weaknesses and fears. And we weren’t afraid to ruffle feathers. Femail tapped into a feeling that life could be better for a woman.’ A year later, Shirley collapsed with viral pneumonia. After a month, she left hospital unable to stand up and could not return to the Mail. Unable to afford home help at this time, Shirley took notes about the housework and used them to write Superwoman. An exhausting book tour led to a diagnosis of ME (chronic fatigue syndrome). Realising she would probably need expensive medical help for the rest of her life, she decided she had better try to write an international bestseller — a bold ambition considering she had never even written a novel. But Shirley wasn’t one to give up easily. In her episode of Desert Island Discs, recorded in 1977, she said: ‘My aim in life is get your foot in where you can and heave against the door.’ Originally conceived as a sex manual for confused teenage girls, Lace told the racy story of four school friends who’d reached the top of their professions. It was a novel filled with scenes of sex and masturbation, erotic encounters with Swiss ski instructors, playboy princes and men about town. Shirley said: ‘Every time someone said young girls shouldn’t read Lace, I thought, “Good-oh! That means they will.”’
Overnight Shirley became the lead author at one of the world’s top publishers Simon & Schuster.
Amongst other things, her newfound wealth bought her a 10th-century chateau near Cannes. In 1994, she was said to be the 84th richest woman in Britain.
As her success grew, her mind turned once again to using her influence to help other women. She became what she called a ‘social entrepreneur’, directing her wealth to further the cause. And she had a habit for identifying valid causes before anyone else; particularly her focus on work-life balance and flexi-hours.
Such was her knack of predicting trends before they happened, she referred to herself as a ‘futurist’. A term meaning, she explained, that ‘you don’t just know the zeitgeist; you know next month’s zeitgeist too’.
Shirley said she was most proud of her work on maths — something she reiterated to me at the end. I first interviewed her about maths in 2014 at her stylish 1930s mansion block flat in leafy East Putney. (The interiors were impeccable — all white walls, low-slung white sofas and white drapes with bold works of art on the walls.) Before launching Money Stuff, she had conducted two years of pilot studies in a school and university.
‘I feel like shaking young girls and grown women who prefer to stay ignorant about maths and its uses,’ she said. ‘I’ve grown tired of 13 and 14-year-olds smugly saying to me: “The day I leave school is the day I give up maths.”
‘I growl back: “The day you leave school is the day you will start to need maths.”’ She was always one for a smart retort, with a lifelong power to shock and amuse.
In her 80s, she reprimanded a Mail interviewer who asked if sex was as important in her real life as it was in her fiction. Her complaint? Not the content of the question but the tense: ‘Was? What makes you think it still isn’t?’ she said, eyes flashing. ‘I may be 80 but believe me, that part of me isn’t dead yet.’
Last month, she wrote that sex was ‘important until I turned 89. Then overnight it stopped, bingo, no response’.
She was equally candid when it came to the harsh realities of old age, hailing the health service for her recovery from brain surgery to remove a benign tumour the size of an orange in 2020 and later confessing her suicidal feelings when social care fell apart during her convalescence mid-pandemic.
IN 2021 she underwent a hip operation and was plagued by kidney infections in her later months. She spent so much time in hospital she joked that she was the Mail’s ‘hospitals correspondent’.
Most recently, Shirley wrote movingly of witnessing the true meaning of love in a critical ward. ‘Few of us really understand the force and power of real love until we are about to lose it,’ she wrote. ‘And with my front row seat on the critical ward, I watch and almost feel that loving devotion. From the four devoted nurses who tend us day and night to the families and friends who visit.
‘This embracing love for a worn-out, tired person is almost touchable. It fills the ward like the scent of hyacinths: indescribable and invisible but precious, because there’s nothing like it: it’s unique.’
Never one to shy away from difficult subjects, she faced her own mortality head on, hiring a death coach to help get her business affairs in order and planning her funeral.
‘I’ve told my sons not to worry when I go, they won’t lose me completely,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in their head for ever.’
As I said my final goodbye, she grasped my hand.
Tears clouding my eyes, I told her she is an inspiration. To me and no doubt everyone else who met her — on paper or in person.
A Superwoman indeed.