10/06/2026
Pertussis -- whooping cough, a disease that, like measles, is surging to levels not seen in years as vaccination rates fall. Children are dying.
"Olivia loved to draw for her little brother, Riley. Her final drawings for him went on his coffin. Riley died of whooping cough at 32 days old, too young for his first vaccine.
Governments talk about vaccine uptake, coverage, rates, percentages. Whooping cough deaths get reduced to crude numbers. But a death is never just a number. It is a family shattered, a heartbroken parent, a devastated sibling -- a lifetime of could-have-beens and will-never-bes. Behind every vaccination rate is a baby who gets to grow up, or doesn't." -- via Light for Riley
Riley Hughes was born in Perth, Australia, in February 2015 -- a healthy second child, a little brother for Olivia. At three weeks old he came down with what looked like a mild cold and a slight cough; a doctor who was called out said he was fine. But his parents knew their son, and when he slept through a night without waking to feed, they took him straight to the hospital.
The diagnosis, once it came, was pertussis -- whooping cough, a disease that, like measles, is surging to levels not seen in years as vaccination rates fall. Riley was too young for his own first shot, which isn't given until two months of age. "At 2pm, our beautiful baby left us," Catherine Hughes wrote of the day he died in their arms, "left this world, and left us devastated and heartbroken." He was 32 days old.
In the weeks after Riley died, his mother learned that a vaccine existed that might have saved him -- not one for him, but one for her. In the USA, the UK, and a handful of other countries, pregnant women were already being offered a whooping cough booster in the third trimester, passing their own antibodies to their babies before birth and covering exactly the gap Riley fell through: the weeks before a newborn can be protected on his own.
In Britain, the shot had cut infant deaths from whooping cough by more than 90 percent. Australia did not yet offer it, and no one had told Catherine it existed. "Riley was too young to be vaccinated," she has said, "but if I had been offered a whooping cough booster during pregnancy, there is a good chance he would still be with us today."
"We knew that we had to do something to prevent other families from experiencing the same pain," Catherine said. So she and her husband set out to spare them the sentence they had been handed. The campaign they built, "Light for Riley," pushed Australia to offer the pregnancy booster free to every expectant mother in the country -- and today Australia has some of the highest maternal vaccination rates in the world. In 2022, Catherine Hughes was made a Member of the Order of Australia for the work.
The lifesaving impact of their efforts can truly be measured in only one way: "No babies have died in Australia from whooping cough since pregnancy vaccination was introduced," Catherine says. "It's bittersweet," she has admitted. "I'm overjoyed that we have these fantastic pregnancy vaccination programs, but really sad they weren't implemented in time for Riley."
In the United States today, the story is running in reverse. Whooping cough has climbed to its highest level in more than a decade -- over 35,000 cases in 2024, up from about 7,000 the year before -- as childhood vaccination slips. Kindergarten coverage for the whooping cough vaccine has dropped below 93 percent, from 95 percent before the pandemic, and multiple American infants have died of the disease in the past two years. The same slide is bringing back measles -- which this year has surged to its highest level in more than 30 years -- a virus the country once came close to erasing.
A vaccination rate is not just a statistic. It is the wall between a disease and the people who can't be vaccinated at all. A child who gets her shots isn't only protecting herself; she is part of that wall, shielding every newborn, like Riley, too young for a vaccine of his own. High coverage leaves the illness nowhere to travel. When coverage falls, it travels straight to the people least able to survive it.
Because pertussis is not just a cough, and measles is not just a rash -- no matter how often they are minimized, especially by those seeking to downplay the need for vaccination. They cause pneumonia, seizures, brain damage, and death, and they take their heaviest toll on the very young. Riley spent his final moments of consciousness, his mother has said, "screaming and distraught" -- "that's how my baby will last remember the world."
His family has spent the decade since turning that loss into protection for children they will never meet. "I loved being Riley's mum for those four weeks," Catherine once wrote. "I wish it were longer."
--> The whooping cough vaccine is recommended during every pregnancy, between 27 and 36 weeks, to protect newborns in the first months before they can be vaccinated themselves. To learn more, talk to your doctor or visit the CDC at https://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/
--> To learn more about Riley's story and his family's work to protect infants from whooping cough, visit the Immunisation Foundation of Australia's Light for Riley at https://www.ifa.org.au
To introduce kids to what used to be another common childhood disease prior to vaccinations, polio, we highly recommend the books "Blue" (https://www.amightygirl.com/blue) and "Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio" (https://www.amightygirl.com/small-steps), both for ages 9 and up
Every vaccine began with a scientist determined to stop a disease. For a picture book that celebrates that spirit -- about a young rabbit who sets out to cure a mysterious illness in her forest -- we recommend "Charlotte the Scientist Finds a Cure" for ages 4 to 8 at https://www.amightygirl.com/charlotte-the-scientist-finds-a-cure"
To introduce children to trailblazing women of public health, we highly recommend "Dr. Jo: How Sara Josephine Baker Saved the Lives of America's Children" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/dr-jo) and "Never Give Up: Dr. Kati Karikó and the Race for the Future of Vaccines" for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/never-give-up)
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