PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK

The good news is, Allegheny County hasn’t seen a case of measles here since 2019. The bad news is that at least one other infectious disease that can be prevented by vaccines has spiked.

That’s the case for pertussis, better known as whooping cough. According to an updated Infectious Disease Dashboard by the Allegheny County Health Department, cases in 2024 shot up to 338, compared with just 7 in 2023.

“For pertussis, we tend to see cycles,” Dr. Kristen Mertz, the Allegheny County Health Department’s medical epidemiologist, recently told WESA.FM. “We have outbreaks and then go several years with not much in the way of disease reports and then another spike.”

The spike here echoed increases on the state and national level.

“Everybody has been seeing an increase in pertussis coming off of a few very low years,” she said. “The reason for that tends to be a bit of waning immunity.”

The updated dashboard gives residents a reader-friendly way to track reportable diseases in the county. It includes a separate category of vaccine preventable diseases, like measles, which had been considered eradicated in the U.S. in 2000 because of vaccination efforts.

An outbreak of measles that started in a Mennonite community in West Texas in February has caught the nation’s attention. On March 3, numbers rose to more than 150 cases, and one unvaccinated 6-year-old child had died. Allegheny County last had a recorded measles case in 2019, when 7 cases were logged; most were in patients aged 20 to 29.

American children typically get two doses to prevent what is considered one of the most contagious diseases on earth — at 12-15 months and at 4 to 6 years through the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, which gives them between 95% and 97% immunity. The respiratory virus is so contagious that someone who is not vaccinated could get infected if they walk into a room two hours after someone with measles has left.

About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people will require hospitalization from measles, which causes a cough, red eyes, high fever and rash, but can lead to more severe health problems, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Among  other categories of diseases on the county dashboard are gastrointestinal disease, which tracks such infections as salmonella and hepatitis A, which can be related to contaminated food, and health-care associated infections.