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The European Commission has appointed a European Reference Laboratory to support the control and monitoring of pertussis and diphtheria in the EU/EEA countries. The University of Turku will lead and coordinate the laboratory, which includes five institutes in four countries.

Researchers of the University of Turku have participated in a study in which vaccinating women with acellular pertussis vaccine in pregnancy boosted the quantity and quality of pertussis-specific antibodies in the early life of infants.

A new nasal pertussis vaccine against whooping cough has shown promising results. The vaccine was shown to be safe and to work against whooping cough in a study conducted in healthy adults. Professor Qiushui He and Project Researcher Alex-Mikael Barkoff from the InFLAMES research flagship of the University of Turku participated in the study. The research article was published in the esteemed medical journal Lancet.

Although vaccination programmes against pertussis are very effective in Europe, new Finnish study shows that the disease is still very common among middle-aged adults in various European countries. At the same time, the results show that the disease is underdiagnosed as the annually reported figures are considerably lower than those discovered in the study.