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Source: http://www.southwestiowanews.com/sit...d=627131&rfi=6
Probing a whooping mystery
Rick Ruggles, Midlands News Service
12/01/2008
Creighton University's Amber Schmidtke wants to know why whooping cough refuses to go away.
Schmidtke, who got her doctorate in medical micro-
biology from Creighton this summer, has been chosen to do postdoctoral research on whooping cough in Atlanta for the next two years.
She'll examine the degree to which the vaccine for whooping cough, or pertussis, wanes in potency. And she'll test a hypothesis: Do the bacteria that cause the disease mutate to elude the vaccine?
Whooping cough vexed Omaha's St. Robert Bellarmine School this fall. At least 17 children there were stricken. Principal Sandra Suiter said almost all had been vaccinated, yet still got sick.
Whooping cough is a bacterial infection of the respiratory tract that can be serious in children. It continues to invade American communities despite the vaccine.
Finding that the bacteria mutate to elude the vaccine would be startling, said Dr. Anne O'Keefe, senior epidemiologist for the Douglas County Health Department. The conventional wisdom suggests the bacteria haven't done that, she said, but it's not an absurd notion.
After all, bacteria have developed resistance to many antibiotics, she said. And influenza viruses mutate constantly, requiring the flu vaccine to be altered annually.
O'Keefe said whooping cough's persistence more likely stems from a waning of the vaccine's potency after a person has received it. The vaccine also protects only about 80 percent of those inoculated, she said.
Dr. Joann Schaefer, Nebraska's chief medical officer, agreed that the mutation hypothesis was interesting.
Schmidtke will be doing her sleuthing under Kathy Tatti, a research biologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who studies whooping cough, among other diseases.
Three years ago, Tatti said, there were a whopping 25,000 U.S. cases of whooping cough, which runs in three- to five-year cycles. She isn't ruling out the possibility that the bacteria are mutating. The research "may lead to that,'' she said.
Schmidtke, 27, said she will study 253 strains of whooping cough dating back to 1935. The strains have been frozen at the CDC and can be regenerated in the laboratory.
She'll be working in a fellowship that's a collaboration of the CDC and the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
A second Creighton alum, Baha Abdalhamid, also earned a postdoctoral fellowship through the association's competitive process and already has begun his research at the University of Nebraska Medical Center's public health laboratory.
Heather Roney, manager of the association's fellowship program, said that Schmidtke is one of nine Americans and that Abdalhamid, a 37-year-old Syrian, is one of five international scientists to receive the fellowships.
Probing a whooping mystery
Rick Ruggles, Midlands News Service
12/01/2008
Creighton University's Amber Schmidtke wants to know why whooping cough refuses to go away.
Schmidtke, who got her doctorate in medical micro-
biology from Creighton this summer, has been chosen to do postdoctoral research on whooping cough in Atlanta for the next two years.
She'll examine the degree to which the vaccine for whooping cough, or pertussis, wanes in potency. And she'll test a hypothesis: Do the bacteria that cause the disease mutate to elude the vaccine?
Whooping cough vexed Omaha's St. Robert Bellarmine School this fall. At least 17 children there were stricken. Principal Sandra Suiter said almost all had been vaccinated, yet still got sick.
Whooping cough is a bacterial infection of the respiratory tract that can be serious in children. It continues to invade American communities despite the vaccine.
Finding that the bacteria mutate to elude the vaccine would be startling, said Dr. Anne O'Keefe, senior epidemiologist for the Douglas County Health Department. The conventional wisdom suggests the bacteria haven't done that, she said, but it's not an absurd notion.
After all, bacteria have developed resistance to many antibiotics, she said. And influenza viruses mutate constantly, requiring the flu vaccine to be altered annually.
O'Keefe said whooping cough's persistence more likely stems from a waning of the vaccine's potency after a person has received it. The vaccine also protects only about 80 percent of those inoculated, she said.
Dr. Joann Schaefer, Nebraska's chief medical officer, agreed that the mutation hypothesis was interesting.
Schmidtke will be doing her sleuthing under Kathy Tatti, a research biologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who studies whooping cough, among other diseases.
Three years ago, Tatti said, there were a whopping 25,000 U.S. cases of whooping cough, which runs in three- to five-year cycles. She isn't ruling out the possibility that the bacteria are mutating. The research "may lead to that,'' she said.
Schmidtke, 27, said she will study 253 strains of whooping cough dating back to 1935. The strains have been frozen at the CDC and can be regenerated in the laboratory.
She'll be working in a fellowship that's a collaboration of the CDC and the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
A second Creighton alum, Baha Abdalhamid, also earned a postdoctoral fellowship through the association's competitive process and already has begun his research at the University of Nebraska Medical Center's public health laboratory.
Heather Roney, manager of the association's fellowship program, said that Schmidtke is one of nine Americans and that Abdalhamid, a 37-year-old Syrian, is one of five international scientists to receive the fellowships.