| Show human serum cuts deaths from whooping cough CHICAGO the mortality mort aliby rate of whooping cough now may be decidedly lowered by the use of a specific serum harriet al felton M D philadelphia reports in the journal of the american medical association for may 5 until very recently dr felton observes there has been no treatment measure which has been able to influence the clinical course of whooping cough to any great degree especially in young infants the development of this particular serum which is now called serum has been under way for less than 10 years thus far the observations have been made on small grodes groups and without untreated control cases the efficiency of human serum has been indicated only by the dramatic reduction ioA of the fatality rate especially in infants in the first six months of life this serum is prepared from the blood of adult donors who have a history of whooping cough in childhood and who receive a series of injections of whooping cough vaccine the serum is separated from the whole blood and usually usual y frozen for storage I 1 severe whooping cough in infants dr felton says is one of the medical conditions before which the physician of today often feels completely inadequate the incident of this disease has dropped significantly during the last five years but the mortality rate in children childre under tinder one year of age continues c priti finues to t 0 be very high the statistics have been difficult to evaluate because many cases have not been reported and in infants death is frequently caused by the complications of the disease rather than the actual disease itself it has been estimated that about 25 per cent of the infants under tinder six months of age who contract whooping cough succumb |
