Whooping cough vaccine weaker but safer Surprise finding The
current whooping cough vaccine offers less protection against
infection but is much safer than the older whole-cell vaccine,
Australian researchers have found. The study examined Queensland
immunisation and disease registers, which included more than
40,000 children born in 1998 who had received the vaccine. They
found the incidence of whooping cough (pertussis) was two to
three times higher in children given the acellular pertussis
vaccine - introduced in the late 1990s - than those given the
older whole-cell vaccine. Co-author Associate Professor Stephen
Lambert, senior research fellow at the Queensland Institute of
Medical Research, says even though the team expected some
difference in efficacy between the two vaccines, the magnitude
of the result, which was published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association, was still surprising. "We didn't
have a figure in mind but we found that whole cell vaccine was
clearly more protective than the