It's Just a Cold

The other day I shared a little bit of insight into how my brain works at times. Subject associations lead from one thing to another, and before you know it, what began as a relatively mundane musing has taken on cosmic proportions. I certainly never thought that, waking up with the beginnings of a cold, I would end up writing about how a lack of gravity would affect medical care in space.

At any rate, the common cold has been bounding about my head (both as a topic and somewhat more literally). While I've been fortunate in that I've only really had to deal with a stuffy nose and only a minor cough, some of my coworkers have been less fortunate. Some manner of respiratory illness has been making the rounds, resulting in some of my workmates having been home for a day or two, both before I got my cold, and after. Talking to them, some actually brought up the subject of pertussis, or whooping cough. No one really knew much about it or what the symptoms were, but it's been in the news a bit lately, with a current epidemic in Washington state (1,484 cases reported as of May 12 [PDF], 2012, compared to 965 cases in all of 2011 and 608 for all of 2010), as well as smaller outbreaks in other states like Montana (142 cases), Idaho (31 cases, including 1 death), Iowa (150 cases), Wisconsin (~1,900 cases, including 1 death), Maine (55 cases [PDF]), Florida (112 cases [PDF]) and others.

Washington pertussis cases through May 12, 2012

I figured it might be a good idea, then, to pull some stuff together about the differences between a cold and whooping cough.