'Stay at home' warning over 100-day Victorian disease sweeping UK

An urgent "stay at home" warning has been issued as cases of a so-called 100-day cough surge with 553 infections in one month. There were over 500 confirmed new infections in England in January alone, figures - which are worrying - have shown.

That is compared to 858 for the whole of 2023, according to the NHS and UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) data. Dr Gayatri Amirthalingam, UKHSA consultant epidemiologist, said: "Whooping cough can affect people of all ages but for very young infants, it can be particularly serious.

"However, vaccinating pregnant women is highly effective in protecting babies from birth until they can receive their own vaccines. Parents can also help protect their children by ensuring they receive their vaccines at the right time or catching up as soon as possible if they have missed any.

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"If you're unsure, please check your child's red book or get in touch with your GP surgery." Last week Professor Dame Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UKHSA, said that there have been 21 deaths among babies from whooping cough since 2012.

She told BBC Breakfast: "There are deaths now - so if we talk about whooping cough for example, pertussis, we can't protect very tiny babies. We have a pertussis - whooping cough - vaccination for children, usually at eight, 12 and 16 weeks.

"But the very tiniest children, the newborns, are the ones who are most impacted and can get very seriously ill, so we need most children to be protected so that they can't pass it on to their young siblings. There's also a maternal programme and that maternal programme rate has dropped as well - it was introduced in 2012.

"We've had 21 neonatal/infant deaths since that time, the last one of which was just at the end of last year. Now most of those individuals, 19 of the 21, were not vaccinated. So I think all of the vaccination programmes are there to help people and there are very real current consequences."