
(CNN) – Highly contagious whooping cough is spreading through California, killing five babies and infecting more than 900 people. Our senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joined us on Monday's American Morning to discuss the state's worst outbreak in five years.


Well, whooping cough has been 'known' essentially forever, causes disease in adults and children, regardless of immunization status. True, immunization will generally decrease the severity of the disease, but whooping cough still kills children every year. The best protection from whooping cough? Immunization, including adult boosters.
This is exactly what you get when you have deluded people like Jenny MacArthy going out trying to convince people not to vacinate their children because she thinks vaccines cause Autism. No doubt we would be much further along in autism research if they did not have to continually spend research dollars to re-prove that vaccines have nothing to do with this. Now you've got children dying of diseases that basically were unknown before.