LOS ANGELES_A baby has died of whooping cough in San Bernardino County, health officials said Tuesday, marking the first infant fatality in California from the disease in two years.
The child's death does not signal the beginning of an outbreak, as officials have cautioned is possible this year. But they urged children and pregnant women to be vaccinated against the disease, also known as pertussis.
"This baby's death is a tragedy for the family and for California as a community, as this is a preventable disease," state public health department director Dr. Karen Smith said in a statement Tuesday. "This serves as a grim reminder that whooping cough is always present in our communities, and immunizations are the first line of defense."
Whooping cough, which can be life-threatening, especially for infants, tends to hit every three to five years. The last outbreak in California was in 2014.
Officials recommend that pregnant mothers get a pertussis booster shot between 27 and 36 weeks of pregnancy, which can protect the baby until it is old enough to begin receiving its own pertussis immunization at 2 months. Studies have found that only about 50 percent of pregnant moms get the vaccine.
Catherine Martin, with the pro-vaccine advocacy group California Immunization Coalition, said some moms might be wary of doing anything seeming unnatural, such as getting a vaccine, during pregnancy.
"There's an ever-growing list of things moms won't do, and I think I would've been afraid of that too, but that's where science comes in," Martin said. "We know it's a safe and very effective way of preventing disease."
