Family Tree Of Pertussis Traced, Could Lead To Better Vaccine
Whooping cough was once one of the leading killers of babies around the world. Now that it's largely controlled with a vaccine, scientists have had a chance to figure out how the disease came into being in the first place.
That story is told in a study published online this week in the journal mBio. And it turns out that whooping cough arose quite late in human history.
Julian Parkhill, at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, U.K., was one of more than a dozen scientists who pulled together a few hundred samples of the bacterium that causes whooping cough, Bordetella pertussis. The team's aim: to create a pertussis family tree.
“ It appears to have evolved from a single event, and that event was the adaptation to the human population.