France is experiencing its worst whooping cough epidemic in 25 years due to lower overall immunity and two virulent proteins in the Bordetella pertussis bacteria.
The results of the epidemic
The cases of whooping cough exploded this year France. According to figures released by Santé Publique France, more than 130,000 people have caught the disease since the start of 2024 in mainland France. The epidemic has already claimed 35 lives, including 22 children, most of them babies under the age of one. The Pasteur Institute described this outbreak as unprecedented in France since “at least twenty-five years old.” The authorities were then obliged to tighten the mesh of vaccination, compulsory for infants and now recommended for all relatives, as well as for the mother during pregnancy. The mothers “transmit immunity to the newborn“, explains Professor Jacky Nizard, gynecologist-obstetrician at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital (AP-HP) on the story of Franceinfo.
Possible causes of this rebound
To explain this rebound in cases of whooping coughepidemiologists have highlighted the multiple health restrictions introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic. “It is possible that […] “we have less stimulated the overall immunity of the population, which is often done through asymptomatic infections”according to the authors of a study carried out by researchers from the Pasteur Institute and Public Health France. Furthermore, the analysis of samples taken from around sixty patients revealed that the bacterium Bordetella pertussis, version 2024, contained two proteins generally absent before the Covid period. However, pertactin and the FIM2 adhesin are of great importance in the adhesion of the bacteria to cells allowing respiration and in the modulation of the host response.
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