According to a new study, the effectiveness of vaccination given for whopping cough starts to diminish with every passing year. This implies that the vaccine, which is given for safeguarding whooping cough, is not proving to be as successful as it should be. The lack in the ability to prevent from the disease with every subsequent year is leaving the teenagers susceptible to catching the infection.

The booster vaccination, known as Tdap, is given for the protection against whooping cough or pertussis, diphtheria and tetanus. However, the long-term protection is not provided by the Tdap, since its effectiveness fades away. During the first year of vaccination, 69% of children aged 11-12 years were safeguarded against whooping cough, the figure declined to 57% in the second year. By the third and fourth year, the protection rate was 25% and 9% respectively.

The first dose of the Tdap vaccination is given when the kids start going to play school, while a second dose is given at the age of 11 or 12 years. Concerns increased in the US after over 48,000 kids were found to have been infected with whooping cough in 2012, which is the highest level since 1955. The researchers undertook the assessment of nearly 280,000 kids to study the success rate of the vaccination. The assessment was carried out for the period of 2010-2014, which marked the whooping cough epidemic.

During the epidemic, maximum children in the age group of 10-16 years were affected despite most of them being vaccinated. According to lead author of the study, Nicola Klein, who is also the Co-Director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center, adolescents who have been given the newer acellular pertussis vaccinations face the maximum risk of getting infected. She added that till the time a long-term solution is not found for this problem, alternative measures, other than the Tdap vaccine, must be mulled over.