Seth Fikkert had a head cold. The 30-year-old worked in a hospital and had two kids, so he didn’t think much of it. But after three weeks, he still felt short of breath, and his 2-year-old son was coughing a little, too.
Fikkert, who resembles Jim from the NBC television show The Office in both his boyish good looks and his sharp sense of humor (he jokes about the mispronunciations his last name inspires), lived in Everett, Washington, which last summer was in the midst of one of the country’s most serious whooping cough epidemics. So he thought it best to get tested.
“I just wanted to rule it out,” Fikkert says. He had gotten his adult booster for pertussis, the bacterium that causes whooping cough, only a year before, so it was highly unlikely that he had the infection. On the morning of Thursday, June 28, he walked into the employee health clinic at Providence Regional Medical Center, where he worked, and asked for a test.
The clinic did not take his concern lightly. Fikkert recalls that afterward, “they masked me up, sent me down for a Z-Pak [the antibiotic Zithromax] at the pharmacy, and sent me directly home.”
And for good reason: Four days later, Fikkert learned he had tested positive. “It was a huge surprise,” he says. His daughter also tested positive; his son tested negative, though if a test is administered more than two weeks after symptoms arise, it may yield a false negative. To keep the infection from spreading, the hospital and the local health department in Snohomish County gave antibiotics to 35 hospital patients and 77 employees that Fikkert had been in close contact with over the 28 days before his diagnosis, despite the fact that almost all of the staff had had boosters.
