Cases of whooping cough are surging almost 500 per cent in parts of Australia.
The national regulator flagged shortages of medicine to treat the disease a year ago.
The shortfall is likely to extend to at least the end of June, but alternative antibiotics are available.
In New South Wales alone, there were 2490 whooping cough cases in July – the largest number in any single month since records began in 1991.
To put that into perspective, that’s more than the whole country recorded across the entirety of 2023.
Across Australia, there’s been more than 19,300 cases so far this year.
That figure that already rivals the last epidemic year of 2016 which saw 20,117 cases – and there’s still five months of the year still to go.
