A video showing a newborn baby boy struggling to breathe as whooping cough ravages his body has attracted world-wide attention and more than 340,000 views.
Baby Riley succumbed to the disease last March but his parents have only recently been able to watch the vision of his last few days.
“At the beginning, we were unable to watch the videos and the couple of times, when I did, it makes you feel sick to your stomach. It’s a horrible thing to listen to,” Riley’s mother Catherine Hughes said.
“But as time moves on, I guess we get a little more comfortable with it - although it is still incredibly painful - and we just think why not use the power of video to try to raise awareness about immunisation during pregnancy?”
Catherine and her husband Greg have been campaigning following Riley’s death – at 32 days old – to raise awareness about the importance of vaccinations.
Mr Hughes said they were hoping the powerful video would encourage more people to act and for pregnant woman in their third trimester to be vaccinated.
“The videos show before and after hospitalisation as well and if it prompts another parent to see a GP and ask the question if their child is displaying those symptoms, that’s the reason we put it out there,” he said.
“We wanted to potentially save lives.”
Mrs Hughes said she did not know she could be vaccinated against the potentially deadly disease while she was pregnant so that her antibodies would pass to her unborn child.
Newborn children cannot be vaccinated against the disease.
“When Riley was in hospital, dying, we tried to work out how this could have been prevented and that’s when we discovered that the UK, the USA and even New Zealand had been doing this for several years now,” she said.
“Queensland women were offered this, but women in WA and other states weren’t. Perhaps if we’d lived there, then we’d still have our child.”
The medical co-ordinator at WA Health’s Communicable Disease Control Directorate, Paul Effler, said they received advice shortly after Riley’s death that it was safe for pregnant women to be vaccinated.
“Previously we were running what was called a cocoon strategy,” he said.
“The goal then was to vaccinate mums and dads and grandparents, and other people would take care of the child to protect that newborn was actually acquiring it from somebody in their cocoon, in their network.
“What we’ve learned is that vaccinating pregnant women while they have the baby in utero is much more effective because the antibodies go directly into the child to protect them when they’re born rather than trying to stop them from acquiring it from someone in their environment.”
Free vaccines for pregnant women were made available shortly after Riley’s death around the nation.
Catherine Riley has been named for her efforts to raise awareness about immunisation including securing 45,000 vaccines for UNICEF.
Dr Effler said the campaign to raise awareness appeared to be working and more than 60 per cent of pregnant women in Western Australia had been vaccinated against whooping cough.
