The Philippine government has announced plans to administer three million doses of a vaccine for respiratory tract infections in the next three months due to a deadly whooping cough outbreak.
In the past five months, dozens of young children in the Philippines have died from the disease, with most cases affecting those under the age of five.
Recent data from the Philippine Department of Health (DoH) revealed at least 862 cases nationwide, a number 50 times higher than last year. Since the beginning of the year, 49 deaths have been recorded.
One of the affected children is Zion Torrepalma, a two-and-a-half-month-old baby who spent weeks in the hospital due to incessant coughing. “It wasn’t the usual coughing sound; it was a wheezing kind of cough,” his father, Danny Torrepalma, told Al Jazeera.
Whooping cough, medically known as pertussis, is identified by its distinctive sound. “It’s a continuous cough followed by a prolonged inspiratory effort,” explained John Kelvin Gabot, a pediatric infectious disease specialist.
Reporting from Manila, Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Lo highlighted that doctors say whooping cough can be fatal but is treatable if detected early. More importantly, it can be prevented through vaccination.
UNICEF noted that the Philippines is among the countries with the highest number of unvaccinated children, which partly contributes to the outbreak. The UN agency estimates that one million Filipino children missed routine vaccinations in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pandemic lockdowns prevented many parents from getting their children vaccinated, and vaccine hesitancy was high. DoH spokesman Albert Domingo told Al Jazeera that during the pandemic, healthcare workers focused on COVID-19 patients, leaving many parents and children at home and hesitant about vaccinations.
As part of the government’s emergency response, healthcare workers are now immunizing children in communities with confirmed whooping cough cases, with plans to vaccinate five million more people by the end of the year.
With vaccine supplies running low, many parents hope the vaccine will arrive before the outbreak worsens.
