Does the economic recession influence the incidence of pertussis in a cosmopolitan European city?

In the last few years, pertussis has re-emerged worldwide. The aim of this article is to study how the incidence of the disease has evolved in Barcelona city over a 16-year period, and determine which factors are associated with the evolution of the disease. We discuss the causes of the observed changes considering different possibilities such as vaccination coverage, vaccine effectiveness, increased surveillance or the effect of the current economic recession.

We performed a cross-sectional, observational, population-based descriptive study using data for the 2000–2015 period from the notifiable diseases register maintained by Barcelona Public Health Agency. We used Poisson regression to compute adjusted odds ratios (aOR) and their corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CI).

A total of 1791 cases were registered. The incidence of the disease increased throughout the city from 2011 onwards. While children under 1 year of age had the highest-incidence and were the most at risk (aOR = 27.18, CI:23.51–31.44), we found that the age of affected children was higher in the last years. Incidence proportion (PRR) was lower among foreign-born children than native children (PRR = 0.43 CI:0.32–0.58). In the whole-cell vaccine period (2000–2004), the percentage of cases under 1 year of age who received the vaccine was lower than in 2005–2015 when the acellular vaccine was used (p = 0.01), suggesting a lower efficacy of the acellular vaccine. However, vaccination coverage in children under 6 years remained high (~ 90%), and there were no significant year-to-year variations (p = 0.757). Moreover, there did not appear to be any significant restrictions in medical care. According to the index of disposable household income (DHI), pertussis incidence increased from 2011 onwards in all neighbourhoods and remained higher in those with lower DHI.

The noteworthy increase in pertussis incidence does not seem to be due to the economic recession, but to other factors here described.