How a team of fearless American women overcame medical skepticism to stop whooping cough, a vicious infectious disease, and save countless lives<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In late November of 1932, the weather cold and windy, two women set out at the end of their normal workday into the streets of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Great Depression was entering its fourth year. Banks across the country had shut down. The city\u2019s dominant furniture industry had collapsed. Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering, both bacteriologists for a state laboratory, were working on their own time to visit sick children and determine if they were infected with a potentially deadly disease. Many of the families were living in \u201cpitiful\u201d conditions, the scientists later recalled. \u201cWe listened to sad stories told by desperate fathers who could find no work. We collected specimens by the light of kerosene lamps, from whooping, vomiting, strangling children. We saw what the disease could do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pertussis, otherwise known as whooping cough, means little to most parents in the developed world today. But it was once among the great terrors of family life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Diagnosing pertussis is difficult on the basis of symptoms alone. It can seem like nothing at first: a runny nose and a mild cough. A parent watching a baby in her crib might notice a pause in her breathing but relax when the steady rise and fall of the chest resumes. A doctor can miss it, too: Just a cold, nothing to worry about. One to two weeks in, though, the coughing can begin to come in violent spasms, too fast to allow for breathing, until the sharp, strangled bark breaks through of the child desperately gasping to get air down her throat. That whooping sound makes the diagnosis unmistakable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s awful, it\u2019s awful. You wonder how they can survive the crisis,\u201d says Camille Locht, a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Lille, France. \u201cThey\u2019re suffocating. They\u2019re choking. They become completely blue. They cannot overcome the cough, and you have the impression that the child is dying in your hands.\u201d It could go on like that for up to three months. To this day, there is little any doctor can do once that whooping stage sets in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n