This was published 7 years ago
Whooping cough vaccination: One quarter of mums failing to pass on immunisation
By Jorge Branco
Tens of thousands of mums are missing the chance to protect their babies from whooping cough when they're most vulnerable, in the first two months of life.
The whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine can't be administered before six weeks old, leaving babies unprotected from birth.
A baby with whooping cough.
But research showed mothers vaccinated in the third trimester of pregnancy passed the immunisation onto their baby, reducing the chance of their baby catching the potentially deadly disease by 90 per cent.
Unfortunately while about 94 per cent of kids were immunised for pertussis nationally, research presented in Brisbane this week showed between half to a quarter of mothers were not getting vaccinated while pregnant.
Professor Ross Andrews from the Menzies School of Health Research said early life was a period of "very high risk" for babies.
"If you get whooping cough in the first four months of life, your risk of death is high," he said.
"It's about one in 200 of the babies that get whooping cough will die in Australia."
Despite some misconceptions, he said the vaccine was entirely safe for pregnant women, who passed the immunity on to their babies through the placenta.
According to research he and colleague PhD student Lisa McHugh presented at the Public Health Association of Australia immunisation conference in Brisbane, babies of vaccinated mums were born at the same average time and weight as non-immunised mothers.
National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance deputy director Kristine Macartney said surveys showed an unfortunately high number of women weren't being immunised during pregnancy because they were concerned about the vaccine's safety.
"When you're a pregnant woman for example, you're told 'don't eat this, don't eat this', all this stuff," she said.
"It's all meant to be very very safe and you're not meant to put anything in your body that you shouldn't and then we're telling people to have a needle.
"Well, what we want to show people is that there's good reasons to have that needle because it's going to protect your baby against whooping cough, and then the other important thing is that needle's very safe."
She said less than 10 per cent of recipients had any reaction at all and the vast majority of those were redness or minor soreness.
Professor Andrews' FluMum study measured 10,000 mothers across six sites, showing a rapid improvement in pertussis pregnancy vaccination uptake from just three per cent in 2014, to 46 per cent the following year.
That number peaked at 74 per cent in the middle of last year but the Menzies research fellow expected it to plateau from there.
About 300,000 babies were born in Australia every year, meaning almost 80,000 children a year were missing out on early-life protection.