The Ministry of Health to allow the first immunization against whooping cough to be administered earlier, a month and a half after birth, and not, as stipulated in the Immunization Calendar – after the baby’s second month. This was decided at a meeting of the Council of Ministers today by Acting Prime Minister Dimitar Glavchev, the Minister of Health Dr. Galya Kondeva, the Deputy Minister of Education and Science Emilia Lazarova and the Chief State Health Inspector Assoc. Angel Kunchev, announced the press service of the cabinet.
The reason for this is that at the moment the most registered cases are those under the age of one year and complications in newborns are more common.
Minister Kondeva pointed out that the situation is constantly being monitored, and the increase in morbidity is not a surprise to experts, as such peaks are usually observed in a period between three and five years. This was also confirmed by Kunchev, pointing out that an increase in cases has been observed since the middle of last year in various countries in Europe and around the world. In Bulgaria, there are 314 cases of whooping cough registered so far, compared to four for the same period in 2023.
During the meeting, the organization of kindergartens and schools where children with pertussis symptoms should not be admitted was also discussed. The authorities call on parents to be responsible as well, at the slightest suspicion to stop their children from attending educational institutions and to seek medical help.
For her part, Emilia Lazarova commented that the Ministry of Education and Science is carefully monitoring the situation and daily collecting information on the number of quarantined classes from the Regional Directorates of Education. The Ministry of Education and Culture is ready to respond to an increase in morbidity and, if necessary, distance learning will be introduced in an electronic environment for individual classes. Prime Minister Glavchev was confident that the State Matriculation Examinations and the National External Assessment will be conducted normally and no children will be harmed.
The Prime Minister stated that he is satisfied with the measures taken and believes that the institutions are prepared. “We can reassure the public, we are ready to deal with it,” Glavchev pointed out.
There are 38 children under the age of one who have contracted whooping cough, said Dr. Kremena Parmakova, head of the Department of Infectious Disease Surveillance at the Ministry of Health, yesterday. Within a month, there will be at least a thousand whooping cough patients, comments Prof. Iva Hristova, director of the National Center for Infectious and Parasitic Diseases.
The chief state health inspector Angel Kunchev said last week in the Council of Ministers that he does not expect a mass spread of whooping cough among the elderly. Whooping cough is a bacterial disease, it responds well to antibiotic treatment, and when caught in time, it is not as severe as the flu, Kunchev said. He recalled that the immunization scheme for children in Bulgaria for whooping cough includes immunization with hexavalent vaccine at two-three, four months, then with pentavalent vaccine at two years, with tetravalent vaccine at four years, with trivalent vaccine at 12 years of age of the child.
The State Health Inspector advises that if you have a cough lasting more than a week or two that is difficult to treat, you should be tested for whooping cough.
The causative agent of whooping cough is circulating in Bulgaria, until last week – most intensively in Sofia and in the western part of the country, and in recent days, cases of whooping cough were found in the regions of Pleven, Haskovo and Veliko Tarnovo.
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Tags: Babies vaccinated earlier
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