Most of the 12,388 cases that the Quebec Health Ministry reported as of Aug. 24 are part of a summer spike that far outstrips the norm in pre-pandemic years
Whooping cough is surging in several parts of Canada, most notably in Quebec, where more than 12,000 people have caught the bacterial illness since the start of the year.
“Make no mistake, there is an epidemic in Quebec,” said Jesse Papenburg, an infectious disease physician and medical microbiologist at Montreal Children’s Hospital. “But on the other hand, it’s normal to have an epidemic every three to five years. That is the expected cyclical pattern that we see with whooping cough.”
The vast majority of people who catch whooping cough recover without needing to go to hospital, but the illness can, in rare cases, be fatal in infants. None of the provincial or territorial health authorities that responded to The Globe and Mail’s queries noted any deaths attributed to whooping cough this year, including Quebec. Quebec’s Health Ministry said by e-mail that 0.7 per cent of cases required hospital admission, most children under 5.on the eastern side of the island in May.
The trends in Western Canada don’t mirror those in the east. The British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, for example, has recorded 101 cases of pertussis as of Tuesday, lower than any other year of the past decade except for 2021, 2022 and 2023, when pandemic-control measures suppressed respiratory illnesses. Alberta has reported 399 cases, which a spokesman for Alberta Health Services said was consistent with the typical annual case count, which usually ranges in the few hundreds.
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