New Brunswick has declared a provincewide outbreak of whooping cough the disease is highly contagious and can be very serious for babies and young children more than 140 cases have now been confirmed Dr Christopher labos is an epidemiologist and cardiologist and he's also the author of does coffee cause cancer and he joins us this Saturday morning so nice to see you Dr labos let's get right into it because we know there is a vaccine for whooping cough so how unusual is it to see such a high number of cases in the province it is a little bit unusual now that's not to say that there haven't been outbreaks of whoop and cough before it has happened before it likely will happen again when it does happen it's usually a combination of waning immunity and also a lack of vaccine coverage I mean you have a vaccine but vaccines only work if people get the vaccine and while our vaccine coverage in Canada is overall pretty good I think at the last estimate in the 2019 data it was in the high 70% 75 or 76 uh something in that range you know it's not as high as it could be so if we did a little bit better with vaccination especially if we could get pregnant women vaccinated that would go a long way to driving these numbers down the vaccine is not 100% effective that's true it's somewhere around 85 to 90% effective in terms of preventing severe illness from whooping coffin Landing small babies in hospital but you know if we can do a little bit better with vaccination we keep the numbers low and it's worth pointing out that we are much better now than we were in the first half of the 20th century when whooping cough cases were orders of magnitude higher than they are right now and we were talking about the fact that this is serious for babies and young children we were looking at images of babies and young children as you were speaking so how is this transmitted uh it really is a personto person uh infection so you get sick you cough sneeze breathe on somebody else and you transmit the the uh bacterial particles to them um and so it is spread personto person you often see it spread amongst households and you know when babies and young children get sick it's usually their siblings or their parents who caught it from somebody brought it back home and then it spreads within households you see you know spread within schools as well but like most infectious diseases it's a personto person thing and so one of the important metrics or one of the important things that we need to do to limit the spread is if you are sick stay home and most importantly if you are sick get treated uh because the good thing about a bacterial infection is that you can treat it with with antibiotics if someone has the whooping cough those symptoms may sound like they just have a common cold so how do we differentiate with those symptoms uh it can be tough and a lot of cases of whooping cough especially milder cases probably do get uh not diagnosed uh and that's how it's able to to spread I mean honestly the only real way to know is to get tested uh you know to go to a hospital and and get tested for it and I think that's the important point point a cold is going to get better on its own right viral illnesses like the cold children get them you know all the time they do start to get better very very quickly so if your child is not getting better is getting worse is struggling to breathe and is clearly suffering then that's an indication that you need to go to the hospital because you probably do need antibiotics at that point so what do people do if they're living in close contact with family members or are concerned about this potentially spreading yeah that's a tricky uh situation in that context I mean you try to isolate people as best as you can you try to prevent having these contact spread as much as possible sometimes you do need to treat people presumptively especially if they're high-risk cases that becomes a very much a caseby case thing but the most important thing is first to identify the cases and unfortunately the only way to get tested is to go to a hospital you can get tested and then you can start doing contact tracing within the family if it's appropriate to do so okay it's almost September uh for some children they are already either back in school or will be soon Co 19's still out there so with kids heading back to the schools universities those classrooms what can we do to uh protect the kids especially with the spread of a new variant well the most important thing that you could do especially with regard to school and of course that accents to work as well is really push for an improvement of indoor air quality in your school or place of business and while longterm it's going to be much better if we can upgrade our ventilation system and deal with some of our older infrastructure that doesn't have central air in the short term a very very simple thing you can do is get air filters for your classrooms that's going to make a big difference in preventing the spread of all kind of diseases not just covid but also influenza the common cold whooping cough a lot of diseases that are spread personto person if you can clean the air that's going to make a big difference that is the one thing that you have at your disposal and of course longterm uh or in the medium term the issue is going to be vation against Co once the boosters are out speaking of vaccination should people get the boosters sooner or should they wait um for the fall winter wave for is there a difference with the protection yeah I get asked some variant of that question almost daily or perhaps not daily but at least weekly for the past few months I think on average unless you are a particularly high-risk individual or doing something that's going to be particularly high risk in terms of travel you're probably better off waiting for the updated booster that's going to come in the fall because the updated booster we presume uh we still waiting for the final confirmation in Canada we've just heard from the US that they're going to be updating the uh the vaccine to reflect the new flirt variants the the point is is that there is going to be an attempt to try to match the new booster to the circulating variants to get you better protection and so while we are experiencing a summer boost now we're uh a summer bump now we are expecting that the winter bump is going to be much larger and so if you can hold off for the better matched updated booster in the fall that's probably your your better bet all right Dr Christopher labos so nice to see you thanks so much pleasure you take care