Kate and Greg Moor weren’t thinking “whooping cough” when their son, 13-year-old Joe, started having coughing fits in early March.

Joe probably just had a late winter virus, the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, couple figured. Maybe it was spring allergies. Other than the coughing, he seemed fine.

Cough medicine didn’t touch Joe’s brutal and increasingly frequent coughing jags — sometimes every five to 10 minutes for hours at a time.

“It was a very violent cough. I just had to pause what I was doing and wait until I was done coughing,” Joe said. “Sometimes it felt like I’d throw up.”

It was difficult to watch Joe’s body convulse uncontrollably, said his mom, Kate. “Nothing seemed to be working,” she said. “It just seemed really aggressive. He’d double over.”

Tests revealed that Joe had pertussis, a bacterial infection. It’s also called whooping cough because of the sound some kids make during the coughing fits that Joe experienced. 

The constant hacking is exhausting and sometimes life-threatening, doctors say, especially for small children and babies with tiny airways.

“They’re unable to catch their breath,” said Dr. Sapna Singh of Texas Children’s Pediatrics near Houston. “They’re fighting for air. They’re fighting to breathe.”

The virulent cough is unparalleled. 

“I had a patient this year who broke two ribs coughing,” said Dr. Molly O’Shea, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “We had an infant who coughed so hard that they ended up with a pneumothorax,” also known as a collapsed lung. “That’s essentially when your lung pokes a hole out of itself and air starts collecting outside the lung.”

Why whooping cough is making a comeback

Whooping cough has been increasing since the early 2000s, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, with about 10,000 reported cases each year. The spread slowed during the pandemic lockdown, as many infectious illnesses did, but cases are rising once again. 

In Michigan, where the Moor family lives, whooping cough cases have skyrocketed. There were 110 cases in the state in 2023, according to the state’s department of health. In 2024, 2,081 cases were reported — a nearly 1,800% increase. 

The state’s on track to meet or exceed last year’s number. In 2025, 497 whooping cough cases have been reported in Michigan. 

In Louisiana, two young infants died of pertussis within the last six months, the state’s surgeon general posted on Facebook at the end of March. In South Dakota, a school-age child died from a co-infection of influenza and pertussis in January, the Department of Health reported. Pertussis contributed to the death of an adult in Idaho in February, according to the state’s Central District Health.

The most common complication of whooping cough is pneumonia, which can be fatal.

So far this year, there have been 8,064 reported cases of whooping cough in the U.S., compared with 3,835 for the same time in 2024, according to the CDC. And there were more than four times as many whooping cough cases in the U.S. in 2024 compared with 2023.