Jean Zahalka, a soft-spoken public health nurse with shortly
cropped gray hair, sat in a small office at the headquarters of
the Snohomish Health District, conducting a phone interview with
the mother of a 7-month-old baby who had just been diagnosed
with whooping cough. Luckily, the little boy didn’t attend
daycare, which meant that he hadn’t had many opportunities to
infect others. And despite his persistent cough, he was holding
up well, possibly because he’d already had two doses of DTaP,
the childhood vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.
But then the mom told Zahalka that the boy’s 3-year-old sister
was also coughing. Zahalka winced. Next, it came to light that
the mother’s 14-year-old niece had spent three days with the
family earlier that week, which meant she was probably infected
as well. The niece’s mother had just lost her job and could not
afford to buy antibiotics, so the health department was going to
have to cover the cost of her treatment in order to curb the
spread of the infection