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

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.

Hills' three oldest children are partially vaccinated, and the four youngest have never had an immunization. "We stopped because we were scared and I didn't know who to trust," she wrote. The recent measles outbreak actually convinced Hills to take her children to get their vaccines, but they caught whooping cough before getting their first shots. Hills hopes that others learn from what is happening to her and her kids. "Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear," she wrote. "We tried our best to protect our kids when we were afraid of vaccination and we are doing our best now, for everyone's sake, by getting them up to date."

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