A mother from Sydney, Australia has posted a distressing video of her baby choking and struggling to breathe in hospital to raise awareness about vaccinations. Sandra Tee uploaded the minute-long video to her Facebook page on Monday and it has already been shared more than 300,000 times.
The video shows Tee and her husband comforting their 5-week-old baby Heidi who is fighting whooping cough. She writes in the post that she shared the clip to bring awareness to the dangers of whooping cough for babies who are too young to be vaccinated and to encourage those who can get vaccinated to do so.
āBabies rely on herd immunity to keep them safe and unfortunately we cannot achieve that without high vaccination rates,ā she wrote.
Later, in a comment on the post, Tee said the hospitalās head pediatrician asked them to film the video to show people that a loud obvious cough isnāt always the most dangerous symptom of whooping cough. She writes that silent episodes, like the one in the video, are also important to watch out for.
āThe pediatrician actually suggested that we should raise awareness of whooping cough and particularly the episodes of apnea where a baby doesn't cough before turning purple/blue,ā Tee wrote in an email to CTVNews.ca. āI thought I would share it on Facebook but I never expected it to go viral.ā
This video may distress some people but I'm sharing to show just how scary and dangerous whooping cough is to babies who are too young to be vaccinated. This is my 5 week old baby during an episode where she chokes and stops breathing. Babies rely on herd immunity to keep them safe and unfortunately we cannot achieve that without high vaccination rates. Whooping cough is not always a loud obvious cough. The scary symptom for babies is when they don't cough but silently choke and turn blue/purple from lack of oxygen. If we weren't in hospital and sitting watching our baby 24/7 the outcome would be fatal. Please don't ignore the warning signs- our baby girl only had a slight cough to start. Please share this to educate more people on the importance of vaccinations.
Posted by Sandra Tee on Sunday, August 21, 2016
In her post, Tee asks people to share her video so more people are educated on the importance of getting vaccinated. She says the response to her video has mostly been positive.
āMost people have been amazingly supportive of the video,ā she wrote in an email to CTVNews.ca. āThere are a tiny handful of people, anti-vaxxers, who have written negative comments.ā
Whooping cough, or pertussis, is a highly contagious bacterial infection of the respiratory tract which affects people of all ages but is especially dangerous for infants under the age of four months old. Life-threatening complications such as pneumonia, the inability to breathe (apnea), seizures and brain damage are particularly risky for infants. In Canada, it is the second most common childhood infectious disease after influenza. Similar to a cold or the flu, whooping cough is spread through mucus and saliva from person to person.
The Public Health Agency of Canada recommends Canadians get their children inoculated against whooping cough with a vaccine regimen that includes shots at two, four and six months, and boosters at 18 months, four to six years old and 14 to 16 years old. It also advises that adults should get at least one more booster in their lifetime. Adults who havenāt received a booster dose are a risk of infection and can also be the source of infection in infants.
Whooping cough is an endemic disease, meaning that itās always present in the population to some extent. So while complete eradication isnāt possible, public health officials encourage vaccinations to help lower infection rates.
