Mom changes her mind about vaccines after her 7 children get whooping cough

The whooping cough vaccine.
(Image credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

A Canadian mother of seven who did not have her children vaccinated is urging other parents not to go down the same path, now that all of her kids have pertussis.

In a post for The Scientific Parent, Tara Hills wrote that she thought her children had a common cold, but after a week of coughing that was becoming progressively worse, she determined something else was going on. "My youngest three children were coughing so hard they would gag or vomit," she wrote. "I'd never seen anything like this before." Once it was confirmed by emergency room doctors that the culprit was whooping cough, the family was put into quarantine.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.