An elderly Massachusetts resident broke her rib after a violent bout of coughing caused by a bacterial infection, scientists report in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
A few weeks ago, according to John Zambrano and Talia Herman, doctors at Harvard Vanguard Hospital in Boston, they were consulted by a woman suffering from strange pain in her right side and a dry cough.
The first attempts to cure her of acute respiratory infections did not help her, which forced the doctors to conduct repeated examinations and obtain tomographic images of her chest and lungs. These photos showed that her pain was not caused by a viral infection of the upper respiratory tract, but by a fractured rib, and that she was infected not only with viruses, but also with the bacterium Bordetella pertussis, the causative agent of whooping cough.
As noted by the 66-year-old patient herself, she did not fall recently and did not experience any serious physical exertion that could lead to such an injury. This led the scientists to conclude that her rib broke during one of the acute attacks of coughing, which the woman recalled after the examination.
Such attacks, according to doctors, quite often affect people who have contracted whooping cough. About two weeks after the onset of the disease, they begin to suffer from a "barking" cough, during episodes of which their lungs are almost completely emptied. According to statistics from the American health services, in about 4% of cases, such attacks of coughing lead to rib fractures and other serious injuries.
Such problems, as the scientists note, can be avoided in two ways - "successfully" having had pertussis once, after which the person develops immunity for life, or with the help of the diphtheria-tetanus pertussis vaccine (DPT), which protects patients from Bordetella pertussis for about ten years. In this case, the woman received a similar vaccination about 8 years ago, which may explain how she managed to contract whooping cough in her old years.
Recall that we recently wrote about how a man tried to restrain a sneeze and injured his throat.
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