If a pregnant woman is exposed to rubella it can cause serious damage to her unborn baby, including birth defects and even miscarriages. The American Academy of Family Physicians warns women who are of child bearing age to make sure they either had rubella or have been vaccinated. Again, CDC says rubella is preventable with a vaccine, the MMR vaccine. Pertussis Pertussis is also known as whooping cough. Bacteria is the culprit in this disease and antibiotics are used to treat it.
Whooping cough is highly contagious.
CDC says you can get it just by breathing the air in a room in which someone with whooping cough sneezed or coughed. The cough slowly worsens over a couple of weeks. The whooping sound comes when the infected person breathes back in after a coughing spell. Incubation is about a week, and someone is contagious from the time the first symptoms appear until after the cough is cured. Again, whooping cough can be prevented with a vaccine.