Although the Covid-19 pandemic officially ended last year, whooping cough cases have skyrocketed across Europe in recent months, reports the US online news service Politico, citing Croatia as the current hotspot in Europe.

In the Czech Republic, where there are reportedly shortages of the whooping cough vaccine, the number of cases is the highest it has been in 60 years, Politico reports, citing the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). There has also been a sharp increase in Denmark, Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom in recent months.

More than 6000 cases in Croatia

“Most of the increase in recent years is due to a return to pre-Covid levels,” said Paul Hunter, Professor of Medicine at the University of East Anglia. But that’s not true of this year, he said, “where infections have risen dramatically and are on track to exceed any annual total we have seen in more than three decades.”

In 2023, a total of 853 cases were recorded in England. In February of this year alone, there were 913 cases, according to the UK Health Security Agency.

The current European hotspot is Croatia, which reported 6,261 cases in the first two and a half months of this year.

According to a report in the British Medical Journal, part of the reason for the spread is a drop in immunisation rates.

Teenagers aged between 15 and 19 make up the majority of current cases, but “virtually all deaths” in the EU and EEA this year have been in infants under three months old, the ECDC said. In the Netherlands, there have been four deaths in recent weeks, more than double the usual annual rate.

Covid hangover

The European disease authority also suspects that Covid could be responsible for the increase.

“The current increase may be related to the lower spread during the Covid-19 pandemic, combined with a suboptimal vaccination rate in certain groups during the Covid-19 pandemic,” it wrote in a report in March.

Vaccinating people is key to containing the outbreak, but that’s easier said than done.

In the UK, five regional health services reported that the pandemic has negatively impacted vaccination rates, in addition to a longer-term decline.

“We have seen a lot of misinformation from the anti-vax lobby during the pandemic and I think some of us were worried that this misinformation would extend to a reluctance to get routine immunisations,” said Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton.

Head also pointed to the measles outbreak in Europe, which was also largely attributed to falling immunisation rates.