Pertussis – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Pertussis in 18 board-style clinical cases with worked explanations. Each case gives you a clinical vignette, four options, the correct answer, and an explanation of why each of the other three is wrong, with the guideline or textbook it follows named on the answer.

Board-style teaching questions for paediatricians and trainees preparing for paediatric board, MRCPCH and licensing examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. When spread peaks
2. No noise between bouts
3. Back again with a cold
4. Confirming it in a baby
5. Late in the cough
6. Four months after the jab
7. Five weeks in
8. Anaphylaxis to one
9. Vomiting of a new kind
10. Reading the night chart
11. Before the swab returns
12. Back to the classroom
13. A household at low risk
14. Vaccinated five days before birth
15. Second baby on the way
16. Fully vaccinated, still caught it
17. Refractory hypoxaemia
18. Fits after a long bout

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: During the whooping paroxysms of the third week, It makes pertussis unlikely and suggests reflux, A return of old paroxysms triggered by the new cold, Serum antibody to pertussis toxin now, Oral fluid antibody to pertussis toxin, It confirms pertussis, as the level is raised, Clarithromycin for seven days to end his infectivity, Azithromycin under antihistamine cover, Pyloric stenosis linked to the early macrolide, A whoop heard for the first time today, When PCR confirms Bordetella, Only when the cough has stopped completely, Azithromycin for every member of the household, Treat him as unprotected and give azithromycin.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Pertussis spreads best while it still looks like a cold.
• In a young infant, pertussis whoops rarely and stops breathing often.
• The hundred-day cough comes back with every cold for a while.
• Early cough, young baby: swab the nasopharynx for PCR.
• Early cough, swab it; late cough, look for the antibody.
• A pertussis antibody test is blind for a year after the vaccine.

Work through the deck once for recognition, then again a week later to test yourself — each question gives the answer and explains why every other option fails.

More from this system: all Respiratory case decks · pediatric reference values.