Whooping Cough Killed 6,000 Kids a Year Before These Ex-Teachers Created a Vaccine
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
After a long day in the laboratory in 1932, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering walked out into the chilly Michigan evening with specially prepared petri dishes, called cough plates, in tow. The two scientists were on a mission to collect bacteria in the wild: one by one, they visited families ravaged by whooping cough, the deadliest childhood disease of their time. By the dim light of kerosene lamps they asked sick children to cough onto each plate, dimpling the agar gel with tiny specks of the bacteria Bordetella pertussis.
As they collected their research samples from “whooping, vomiting, strangling children,” Kendrick and Eldering, both former school teachers who lived together in Grand Rapids, “listened to sad stories told by desperate fathers who could find no work,” Eldering later recalled . “We learned about the disease and the Depression at the same time.”
Amazing, more women doing great things that no one knows about...Soon they discoveries/women will be common knowledge.
That's pretty brave to expose themselves to that disease.
Indeed they were, pat.
The more I dig around the more great discoveries or amazing things that women have done yet receive little if any recognition for. Gotta change that.
There is actually another female doctor to thank for that vaccine as well. Her name is Dr. Denmark. She's from the Atlanta area and was the oldest practicing pediatricians in the US. I took my Anna to see her when she was 104. She died at 114. She helped develop the TdAP vaccine. I am so honored to have been able to bring my oldest daughter to see her. I have pics. Such a wonderful physician and person.
Good information, thanks GaJenn.
Heck, post the photos.
I was told several of my ancestors died of whooping cough
During the time frame before the vaccine it was a very deadly disease in the US...A lot of kids died from it over the years.
Oddly enough, my mom lost two brothers, one to whooping cough and the other to measles. So people like these women who saw the need for a vaccine, have saved 10's of thousands of lives worldwide.
Two deadly diseases that were stopped with vaccines.
Don't get the idea that whooping cough has been eliminated. I had it just a few years ago. It went through our kids' school it seems, and one of our girls brought it home. I'm no anti-vaxer. She had her shots when she was little but this was before her last booster at 11 or 12. So, she got it, but it wasn't too bad.
Apparently, they recommend that all adults over the age of 19 get a one-time booster vaccine, but no one ever told me that. So I got it and I was sick for months.
It sucks balls, by the way. If you get the full-throated version (no pun intended) like I did, that whole 60-day or 100-day cough stuff is probably an average or minimum estimate. You can't go anywhere or do anything. School, work, church, whatever. No one wants you around when you're coughing all the time.
And unless you already have asthma, it's hard to appreciate how annoying and scary it is to have your airway spasm closed so that no air at all can pass. I'd say it took me a good 4 or 5 months to get past the most acute symptoms and the better part of a year before I would cease to randomly cough for no reason.
A family I know was affected by it. The girls were in foster care, and their biological parents hadn't had them all vaccinated. The youngest got whooping cough. It was misdiagnosed as asthma for a while, because everybody assumed she'd been vaccinated.
Dear Brother Kavika: Vaccines work.
Good on these bright courageous and caring women.
E.