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.
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.
“It’s awful, it’s awful. You wonder how they can survive the crisis,” says Camille Locht, a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Lille, France. “They’re suffocating. They’re choking. They become completely blue. They cannot overcome the cough, and you have the impression that the child is dying in your hands.” 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.
Until the mid-20th century, there was also nothing anyone could do to prevent the disease. It was so contagious that one child with pertussis was likely to infect half his classmates and all of his siblings at home. Pertussis killed up to 7,500 Americans a year in the early 1930s, most of them infants and young children. Survivors sometimes suffered permanent physical and cognitive damage.
All of that changed because of Kendrick and Eldering. They’d been hired to do routine daily testing of medical and environmental samples. But research on whooping cough became their obsession. They worked late into the night, with almost no funding at first, in what one reporter described as a “dumpy broken-down stucco” building. They benefited from the work of their own hand-picked research team, which was remarkably diverse for that era. They also enlisted the trust and enthusiasm of the public. The city government and private donors stepped forward to cover the cost of their first clinical trial. Doctors, nurses and ordinary city residents rallied to help. Mothers volunteered not just their time but also their children as experimental subjects.
Medical men with better credentials were deeply skeptical. But where other researchers had failed repeatedly over the previous 30 years, Kendrick, Eldering, and their team succeeded in developing the first safe and effective whooping cough vaccine. Through their innovations, childhood deaths from whooping cough plummeted in the United States and then the world.