Who catches whooping cough? You are at
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It all depends on the environment you live in. Medically and economically developed, or otherwise.

Where there is no immunization against whooping cough in a population, most will have had the illness by the time they are five years old and most will remain immune for the rest of their lives because the illness builds up good antibody levels, and because these antibodies are being boosted by frequent contact with the organism.

But in the developed world we now live in an environment where most children are immunized early in life against whooping cough, giving them important protection against it at an age when it would otherwise be so easily spread by them to their newborn unimmunized siblings whom it could kill.  We must remember that immunization has drastically reduced the impact of whooping cough on our populations.

So nowadays in developed communities there are three groups of people who are susceptible.

  1. Newborns until they have had their primary whooping cough shots (maybe under 5 months). It is very dangerous for this age group. One in fifty may die.

  2. Children who have not been immunized

  3. People whose last whooping cough immunization was more than a decade previously

The bottom line
It used to be children under 5 who caught it before about 1950. At the present time (2012) in the UK where the imminization rate in children is about 94% (2011), official figures show that as many adults are affected as children. My impression from feedback to this site is that at the present time in the UK more adults than children (say under 13 years) are affected. I may be different in the USA and Australia where immunization rates may be lower.