Whooping Cough question

[corrio]

I'm pretty sure my 3 year old had wWhooping Cough late August.. Her cough lasted a good 10 weeks.. I took her into the doctors but i chickened out telling them that she was unvaxed, came out with a asthma meds, that I never got..

Heres the question,
If she ever has blood work done, can they test and see if she has had it like they can with the measles?

Lisa

[amnesiac]

Since this is about illness & testing rather than vaccines I'm moving to H&H.

[tanyalynn]

There are titers for WC, but you may need to do the bloodwork within a few years to know for sure. It seems like antibody levels go up and down quite a bit, people seem to get re-infected fairly regularly, but after the first time, it's often pretty mild. Though once you've had it, I'm not sure how likely it is for antibody levels to drop all the way to zero, so maybe you'd be able to tell even many years from now.

I know after not being vaccinated in years, my levels had dropped below the "immune" threshold, but they were non-zero, and interestingly when the kids got a prolonged coughing illness that we didn't test for, DH and I were both only mildly coughing, we wouldn't have thought we were sick except for DD's coughing/vomiting.