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The Extent of America's (Totally Unnecessary) Whooping Cough Outbreak
The stateside spread of vaccine-preventable diseases, in one map.
The number of whooping cough cases in California jumped 61 percent in one year, from 1,023 in 2012 to 1,669 in 2013, according to a recent report from the California Department of Health. The majority of the sufferers? Kids between the ages of seven and 16, who made up 83 percent of cases.
Those number are all the more horrifying when you consider this: before it became somewhat more culturally acceptable to not vaccinate your kid, America had all but relegated pertussis to the waste bin of western diseases. The pertussis vaccine has been around since 1926, and was combined with the diphtheria and tetanus shots in 1948. (The shot was updated in 1999.)