Whooping cough: My uncle Russell Howie’s legacy 75 years after his death

Russell Howie at 20 months old. He died six months later, in September 1947, after contracting whooping cough.

Every family has a story of untimely loss, of young lives cut short through war, accident or - in the case of my family - illness. This is the story of my uncle, who died 75 years ago of whooping cough, the same preventable disease that’s killed three Kiwi babies this year and sparked fears of undetected spread in the community. Cherie Howie reports.

My uncle died of whooping cough two months after his second birthday.

It’s one of the few things I know about him.

As she neared the end of her own life, late former US first lady Barbara Bush would describe the grief that followed the loss of her three-year-old daughter Robin to leukemia as something that, over the many years since, eased to the point where its anniversary could pass unnoticed.

I don’t know if my grandparents, who also carried the weight of a child’s death for decades, shared that experience.

Nanny lived almost 60 years more; Pop, more than 40.

But they almost never talked openly about Russell, neither his short life, nor his premature death - a personal tragedy that occurred three weeks before their second child, my dad, was born.

A highly transmissible lung infection caused by bacteria, whooping cough is especially dangerous to babies.

Three children less than one year old have died from whooping cough in New Zealand this year, two in February and an unrelated case announced this week, and health authorities fear the deaths - among 11 whooping cough cases reported this year - are a sign the disease is spreading undetected.

Vaccination - introduced here in 1945, the year my uncle was born - is recommended for babies, pregnant people and anyone who will spend time with babies.

The first vaccine offered in New Zealand, against smallpox, came in 1863, but it wasn't until the polio epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s that vaccines were more widely adopted. Pictured are schoolboys receiving the polio vaccine in the 1950s.

I don’t know if Russell was immunised all those years ago.

Given his birth the year the vaccine was introduced, and that it was then only administered on request, it seems unlikely.

Dad’s life may have been saved by the protection of his mother’s womb.

The miracles of life are too vast to pin on one instance of grace, however easy it is to imagine your existence as dependent on when someone got sick, and when someone else was born.

But our cemeteries bear silent witness to the sad history of infectious disease in New Zealand, decaying headstones a fading testament to young siblings succumbing one after another to illnesses now rarely heard of since the widespread uptake of vaccination, a medical advance described again and again in health literature as a “modern public health miracle”.

Nanny and Pop could’ve lost both their children.

For me, born more than 30 years after Russell’s death, his story has emerged in snippets, and always from those outside the blast zone.

There was dad’s older cousin, who spoke of whooping cough’s wicked speed as Russell’s life was taken in less than a week, and mum’s sister, surprised to hear the toddler’s name spoken to her by someone she barely knew.

“While Brent’s alive, Russell’s alive”, she would say, repeating Pop’s out-of-the-blue comment to her - his daughter-in-law’s sister - about my older brother, the grandchild who most closely resembled our late uncle.

My grandparents, Cyril and Hope Howie, lost their first child, aged two in 1947, to whooping cough. They're pictured visiting my dad, Trevor, and older siblings Brent (left) and Nicola in 1977, before I was born.

It was more than he’d ever said to his own children.

As kids, dad and his younger brother Bevan would ask about the little boy in the large painted photo that hung in their home, always hearing the same answer.

“It’s you.”

The wall of silence broke only in their teens, with morsels of information emerging from extended family, and a single sentence uttered by Pop as he drove his family past the South Otago cemetery where Russell is buried.

“You’ve got a brother in there,” he told his two surviving sons.

Nothing more was said.

Our family would, much later, spend hours searching that same cemetery for Russell’s then-unmarked grave in a family plot - I only found out while writing this story that it was Nanny who subsequently arranged for a small plaque bearing his name to be added.

When Pop died in 1989, Nanny agreed when Dad and Bevan asked if Russell should be included in the Timaru Herald death notice, my grandparents having moved their family permanently to rural South Canterbury a few years after Russell’s death.

Mum and her sister-in-law, Bevan’s wife, would spend Pop’s wake answering the same question from the bewildered friends and neighbours who’d known my grandparents and their surviving sons for almost 40 years.

“Who’s Russell?”

I don’t remember a time I didn’t know about Russell’s place in our family, even though the life of this little person from the past was hidden in the memories of those I knew never to ask.

Even as an adult, I never asked.

So many things left unsaid, among them - because no one cared as much about this in the 1980s - what Nanny and Pop thought about vaccination.

Family lore is that Dad and Bevan were jabbed for whooping cough, and Dad also remembers lining up at school for Jonas Salk’s famous polio vaccine, something that would’ve required parental permission.

I hope they’d be okay with Russell’s story being told to encourage vaccination, especially at a time when disinformation has spooked some away from the preventative health measure, and child immunisation rates have plummeted following the Covid-19 pandemic.

As of December, only 82.4 per cent of two-year-olds were up to date with their vaccinations, well below the 95 per cent rate required for herd immunity. Among Māori children, the rate was even worse - 66.4 per cent.

The only photo of South Otago toddler Russell Howie - he lived in Moneymore, South Otago, and this studio portrait was taken during a visit to Dunedin six months before he died of whooping cough.

Seventy-five years after his death, almost everyone who knew Russell is now dead themselves.

His memory endures only in the studio portrait that sits on my parents’ mantelpiece, the sole photo that remains from his brief life.

The boy who didn’t live to benefit from the miracle of vaccination is frozen in time, happy and healthy in his home-sewn romper pants and shirt, shiny shoes buckled across his little feet and cowlick swept across his forehead.

His was a good life, but much too short.

The brothers that followed had families, friendships and farms; they had hobbies at home and adventures abroad. Still do.

Russell has never been forgotten, but what legacy can someone leave when they die before they really had a chance to live?

Their story.

What is whooping cough?

Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, is a highly infectious and serious lung infection caused by bacteria.

It’s spread by coughing and sneezing, and infectious people can pass it on a week before symptoms appear.

Initial symptoms include a runny nose, cough and fever. After a week to 10 days, the cough becomes more severe and may end with a “whoop”, dry retching or vomiting.

If diagnosed early, treatment with antibiotics can reduce the infection period to between two and five days. Left untreated, patients can be infectious for up to three weeks.

Unwell people should avoid visiting young babies, and anyone who lives with a baby and has a new or worsening cough, sneezing, runny nose or fever should self-isolate if possible, according to Te Whatu Ora - Health New Zealand.

Whooping cough immunisations are routinely given to pregnant people at 16 weeks, and infants at six weeks, three months and five months old, with boosters at age four and 11.

The injections are free for under-18s, pregnant people, high-risk patients, and adults between 45 and 65.

Immunisation is available at medical centres, Hauora and Pacific health providers and some pharmacies.