whooping cough
Meaning of whooping cough: Whooping cough spreads easily and causes severe, prolonged coughing fits, posing the greatest danger to infants and young children.
Definition of whooping cough
Whooping cough is a highly contagious bacterial infection of the airways caused by Bordetella pertussis, a bacterium that attaches to and irritates the lining of the respiratory tract. The illness typically begins with mild, cold like symptoms before progressing to episodes of severe, repeated coughing.
These coughing episodes can be followed by a forceful intake of breath that produces a distinctive whooping sound, which gives the illness its common name, though this sound is less consistently present in infants, adolescents, and adults than in young children. Severe coughing fits can be exhausting and can lead to vomiting, and the strain of coughing can occasionally cause small blood vessels to break in the eyes or skin.
Whooping cough poses the greatest risk to infants, who can develop serious complications, including difficulty breathing, and widespread vaccination has substantially reduced how often the illness occurs, though outbreaks can still happen when community immunity declines.
Also known as
Used in a sentence
Laboratory testing confirmed whooping cough as the cause of the child's persistent cough.
Good to know
The characteristic whooping sound after a coughing fit is often absent in infants, adolescents, and adults, so whooping cough can be harder to recognize by symptoms alone in those groups compared with young children.