update on 'Lurgy

There's a general feeling I might have had whooping cough after all. Its going around and previously vaccinated people are getting it. As an adult, you don't always get the same symptoms as a child, the very long symptoms (still coughing all night and not doing a full days work) etc. etc though my coush does sound a lot like the one I have a link to.

The green stuff below is taken straight out of http://textbookofbacteriology.net/pertussis.html
The first stage, colonization, is an upper respiratory disease with fever, malaise and coughing, which increases in intensity over about a 10-day period. During this stage the organism can be recovered in large numbers from pharyngeal cultures, and the severity and duration of the disease can be reduced by antimicrobial treatment.

The second or toxemic stage of pertussis follows relatively nonspecific symptoms of the colonizaton stage. It begins gradually with prolonged and paroxysmal coughing that often ends in a characteristic inspiratory gasp (whoop). To hear the characteristic sound of whooping cough click whoop.wav (whoop.wav is copyright of Dr Doug Jenkinson, Nottingham, England. www.whoopingcough.net). During the second stage, B. pertussis can rarely be recovered, and antimicrobial agents have no effect on the progress of the disease.......................................Many young children are vaccinated against whooping cough with the pertussis vaccine. However, the vaccine is only approved for children under seven years of age. Antibody-mediated immunity wanes in approximately ten years, leaving older individuals more susceptible to the disease. Adults get infected, often to a lesser degree, but they are still able to spread the disease to unimmunized children.

Sounds very familiar. This means I may have spread it to Cairns, Kuranda, Mareeba, Innisfail (where I coughed in a very, very crowded Maccas at lunch time) and a few incidental places. I was hygienic with my coughing & did lots of hand washing, and my highly susceptible cousin hasn't come down with it, so maybe I haven't given it to anyone.

I knew I should have got someone to take a nasopharyngeal swab and streaked it out to check for Bordetella pertussis before I started antibiotics. Then I could have added the isolate to the clinical isolate collection in the -80C freezer.
I think the microbiologist in me is showing. We have a general attitude of; "wait, give me a sample/photo of the symptoms/biopsy of what the doctors take out so I can add it to the collection/use it for lectures/cut it up and look down a microscope at it"

Here endeth the microbiology lesson.