Donna Gordon Blankinship

SEATTLE (AP) — Washington state’s worst outbreak of whooping cough in decades has prompted health officials to declare an epidemic, seek help from federal experts and urge residents to get vaccinated amid worry that cases of the highly contagious disease could spike much higher.

It’s the first state to declare a whooping cough, or pertussis, epidemic since 2010, when California had more than 9,000 cases, including 10 deaths. Washington has had 10 times the cases reported in 2011, and so has Wisconsin with nearly 2,000 cases this year, though that state has not declared an epidemic.

California responded to its crisis two years ago with a public information campaign, readily available vaccines and a new law requiring a booster shot for middle- and high-school students. Doctors were urged to spot whooping cough early, send infected babies to the hospital and promptly treat those diagnosed. In 2011, the number of cases there dropped significantly.

In Washington, about 1,280 cases have been reported in 2012, and officials believe the state could see as many as 3,000 cases by year’s end. Health Secretary Mary Selecky declared the epidemic April 3, and since then officials have bought up the vaccine and made it available for free for people who don’t have insurance.

State officials have asked hospitals to vaccinate every adult who goes home with a new baby, and urged businesses to encourage their employees to get the adult booster shot. Washington already requires a booster shot for middle- and high-school students.

Last week, Gov. Chris Gregoire announced the state is putting $90,000 into a public awareness campaign and diverting some federal money to pay for 27,000 doses of vaccine. The state has also asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to send a special team of investigators and an epidemiologist to the Washington.

State epidemic declarations are up to the states; there are no federal regulations for such decisions. Selecky said this is the first time in 14 years she has declared a state epidemic, but felt she needed to take action to stop the disease from spreading further.

“When we’ve looked historically, we’ve seen nothing like this,” she said. “We’re taking this very seriously.”

Adults and teens need booster shots so they don’t give pertussis to the babies in their lives, said CDC spokeswoman Alison Patti

“We want to create a cocoon of protection around them,” she said. “We’re really worried about keeping babies safe.”

Pertussis is known as whooping cough because of the “whooping” sound people often make while gasping for air after a coughing fit. A highly contagious bacterial disease, it starts off like a cold but leads to severe coughing that can last for weeks. In rare cases, it can be fatal.

Until routine child vaccination became widespread in the 1940s, pertussis caused thousands of fatalities each year in the United States. While deaths are uncommon today, they still occur: In recent weeks, infants in New Mexico and Idaho have died from the disease.

Because the adult booster for pertussis — called Tdap for tetanus, diphtheria and acellular pertussis — has only been available since 2005, fewer than one in 10 adults have gotten the shot and most don’t even know they need it. The numbers are better for teens: about 70 percent have received a booster shot. Most people do not find out they even need a booster until they go to the doctor for a tetanus shot, Patti said.

Patti emphasized that pertussis isn’t spreading because of an anti-vaccine movement. Among possible reasons for the recent spike are that diagnoses in teens and adults are getting better and doctors are doing a better job with reporting, she added

Health officials say the disease tends to return in three-to-five-year cycles.

“The incidents tend to oscillate,” said Herbert Hethcote, a professor emeritus from the University of Iowa who is a specialist in mathematical modeling of the spread of infectious diseases,

He said the growth of pertussis in Washington state has followed a pattern: As the population ages, the immunity level goes down because the vaccine is wearing off. The disease spreads and the cases grow until more people get the vaccine and the numbers go down again.

Hethcote said his daughter had whooping cough as an adult during the last spike of cases in Washington, four or five years ago. She coughed so hard she broke a rib and was sick for more than a month, he recalls. She never found out how she caught it but the experience raised awareness in his family that pertussis is not just a children’s disease.

NORTH BEND, Wash. (AP) — Authorities on Monday named a man as a person of interest in the deaths of two women whose bodies were discovered after a fire at a Washington home that had its front door blocked by furniture.

Investigators have been unable to locate the man, 41-year-old Peter A. Keller, who lives at the home near North Bend, King County sheriff’s Sgt. Cindi West said. Hours after the Sunday morning fire, they found a car that had been missing from the home elsewhere in the Cascade foothills city about 30 miles east of Seattle.

Detectives are handling the case as a homicide as they wait for a cause of death from the county medical examiner’s office.

Fire crews who responded to the blaze had to force their way inside because the door had been blocked by a couch and other furniture.

“It was clearly and intentionally barricaded,” West said.

Fire crews also found at least five gas cans in the house.

A couple and their daughter live in the house. The identities of the victims have not been released.

Cate Reynolds said her daughter was best friends and high school classmates with the girl who lived there. She stopped by the home Sunday with her daughter and some friends because “they wanted to just come and be close and process some stuff,” Reynolds said.

Continue Reading Close

SEATTLE (AP) — Once-a-year evaluations aren’t enough to help teachers improve, says a report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And school districts using infrequent classroom observations to decide who are their best — and their worst — teachers could be making some big mistakes, according to the second part of a multi-year study from the foundation.

Preliminary results were posted online Friday.

Good teacher evaluations require multiple nuanced observations by trained evaluators. Those results should be combined with other measures, such as student test scores and classroom surveys, to gather enough information to both evaluate teachers and help them improve, the researchers found after nationwide experiments involving thousands of teachers.

The most common teacher evaluation method used by school districts today — a single classroom observation once every few years — has only a 33 percent chance of resulting in an accurate assessment of a teacher, the researchers found.

“This confirms what many teachers have been saying for years: That when high stakes decisions are being made, school districts should allow for more than one observation,” said Tom Kane, deputy director of the Seattle-based foundation’s education program and leader of the research project.

Teachers across the nation are getting too little feedback and are being left alone to figure out what they need to do to improve, says Vicki Phillips, director of the foundation’s education program. If the nation is serious about improving the quality of its teachers, improving evaluation and feedback should be an important element of that effort.

For the past two years, the foundation has been working to build a fair and reliable system of teacher evaluation and feedback to help teachers improve their craft and assist school administrators in their personnel decisions.

This report comes amid efforts across the country to change the way teachers are evaluated. Most of the new systems are a direct result of a call by the federal government for education reform, and many are finding implementation of the evaluation systems difficult.

The core of the Gates Foundation study was a collection of digital videos of more than 13,000 lessons in classrooms of teachers who volunteered to be studied.

The classrooms are being studied in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the Dallas Independent School District, Denver Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla., Memphis City Schools, The New York City Department of Education and Pittsburgh Public Schools.

The main conclusions of this report are as follows:

— High quality classroom observations require clear, specific standards, well trained and certified evaluators and multiple observations per teacher.

— Classroom evaluation is not enough. That information should be combined with student feedback and data on improvement in student test scores. Combining the three kinds of evaluations offsets the weaknesses of each individual approach.

— The different evaluation methods still need to be refined, but they’re better than what most districts are using now.

Memphis Public Schools used to evaluate its teachers once every five years. With financial help from the Gates Foundation, the district has switched to a system of four-to-six classroom visits by both principal and peer evaluators, followed by feedback meetings focused on improvement.

The new system was implemented after teachers and administrators worked together to set new district-wide standards and both teachers and principals were thoroughly trained in the new system.

“This process is neither quick nor easy. And we’re still working out the kinks,” said Tequilla Banks, coordinator of research, evaluation and assessment for the Memphis district.

She said, however, that both teachers and administrators feel the effort is worth it.

The president of the teacher’s union in Hillsborough County Schools, which is using both teacher and principal evaluators, said teachers have embraced the new system.

“We’re new in this process, but already many teachers tell us they value the conversations they’re having with their peers,” said Jean Clements.

Both Hillsborough and Memphis are also experimenting with student surveys.

Those surveys, also being piloted by the foundation in school districts around the nation, are not popularity contests, Kane said. They focus on class experiences and ask students to talk about things like whether they are being challenged and engaged.

College professors have been evaluated by their students for years. Kane, who is also a Harvard professor, said he thinks school teachers could learn to appreciate that feedback as well.

“One thing I’ve learned is once you show people the questions, much of the hesitance fades away,” he said.

Kane emphasized that the main finding of this research is that the more information gathered about any one teacher, the better chance she or he will be given an accurate evaluation that helps improve teaching practice.

Districts that don’t have the money to completely change their evaluation systems can take some first steps that the foundation and the school districts thought would make a meaningful difference. Those ideas include:

— Better training and certification for observers, including videotaping lessons and having more than one person evaluate a teacher.

— Student surveys to supplement other methods of evaluation or as a way to help teachers and their mentors work together.

— Convene meetings between teachers and administrators to start collaborating on improving the evaluation system.

— Look at the foundation’s research results and start a conversation about which parts of a teacher’s practice are most closely linked to student success. Focus professional development on those areas.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federal of Teachers, expressed concern that too much emphasis is being placed on evaluating teachers and not on improving their performance.

“Until we make a commitment to develop evaluation systems that are first and foremost about continuous improvement and professional growth, we will continue to struggle in our efforts to provide every child with a high-quality education,” she said in a written statement.

___

Associated Press writer Donna Blankinship can be reached at http://twitter.com/dgblankinship

___

Online:

Measures of Effective Teaching Project: http://www.metproject.org

Continue Reading Close

SEATTLE (AP) — Here’s another reason for holdouts to join the social media site Facebook: It’s a great place to find a kidney.

Between the kid photos and reminiscences about high school, more and more pleas for help from people with failing kidneys are popping up. Facebook and other social media sites are quickly becoming a go-to place to find a generous person with a kidney to spare, according to the people asking for help and some national organizations that facilitate matches.

Damon Brown found a kidney on Facebook after telling his story on a special page the Seattle dad created under the name, “Damon Kidney.” His friends and family forwarded the link to everyone they knew and on Jan. 3 a woman his wife has known for years, but not someone they consider a close family friend, will be giving him a kidney.

“She said it wasn’t really for me. It was for my kids, because they deserve to have a dad around,” said Brown, 38.

Brown’s story is not unique, said April Paschke, a spokeswoman for the United Network for Organ Sharing, a private nonprofit organization that manages the nation’s organ transplant system for the federal government.

“We see more and more people matched up by social media,” she said. “It’s an extension of the way we communicate. Before we found the Internet, people found other ways: through a church bulletin, word of mouth or an advertisement even.”

This past year, a man in Michigan also found a kidney donor through Facebook, and a Florida woman found one through Craigslist.

Damon Brown admits he was a little embarrassed to ask for help so publicly. Except for telling close friends and family, the Seattle father of two young boys had been keeping his illness pretty quiet.

He was on the official transplant list and had started mobile dialysis through Northwest Kidney Centers but Brown was seeing his health deteriorate — he was constantly tired and achy. He couldn’t sit on the bed to tell bedtime stories to 5-year-old Julian and 3-year-old Theo because he had to stay close to his dialysis machine.

“I’m a strong guy, but I would have to say, it’s been rough this year,” he said. Brown had put himself on the long wait list for a kidney from a deceased donor, knowing he would have to wait at least three years before he was called.

After one particularly difficult visit with his doctor, Damon and his wife, Bethany, decided to create the Facebook page, which has attracted more than 1,400 friends.

A few weeks ago, after the transplant was approved and scheduled, Brown posted the good news to his Facebook friends. More than 300 people responded: “Whoo hoo….what a great Christmas present,” wrote Kelly L. Hallissey. “This is awesome!! Praying for you and your family for positive news and a great way to begin 2012!” wrote Brenda Tomtan.

Many people are not aware that kidney and liver donations can now come from living donors.

In 2010, 16,800 kidney transplants were performed in the United States, of which 6,277 came from living donors, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. An average of 46 kidney transplants take place each day in this country, while another 13 people who have been waiting for a kidney die each day. About 90,000 are on the transplant list right now.

Jacqueline Ryall, 45, said she felt a need to donate a kidney to Brown to give back her own good health and all she has been given. She’s not a mom and gushed about how beautiful Damon and Bethany’s kids are.

“The real reason I’m doing this is he’s got kids and he’s a good guy,” she said. “My life is in a good place. I’ve been given lots and I have a responsibility to give back.”

Ryall said her elderly mother does not understand why she would give a kidney to someone other than her own brother and sister, and her family is worried about her health going forward.

After her own research, however, Ryall decided it’s relatively safe for a woman in good health to donate a kidney. If something is going to go wrong with her own kidneys, she has heard they usually fail in twos.

“Right now it feels like absolutely the right thing to do,” she said, adding that she hopes her decision will help make other people less afraid to do the same thing.

News media coverage of his quest flooded his hospital with so many requests for information — from total strangers — that Brown said he was asked to pull back on his publicity efforts. Four people passed the initial screening and came in for tests. Now that he sees a happy ending coming for himself, Brown would like to do whatever he can to help others.

April Capone, the previous mayor of East Haven, Conn., knows what Brown means about the attraction of happy endings.

Two years ago, she was sitting in her office checking her Facebook feed, when a post from one of her constituents popped up saying he needed a kidney.

“At that moment, Carlos was at Mayo, testing to get on the transplant list,” said Capone, 36. “He really didn’t tell anyone he was sick. The doctor said, ‘if you don’t do it, no one is going to know’.” So Carlos Sanchez pulled out his cell phone and posted the request and Capone responded immediately.

“I knew from the second I saw his post that I was going to be a donor,” said Capone, who barely knew Sanchez at the time. Now they’re as close as siblings, talk on the phone almost daily and meet for lunch regularly.

Capone said she had no personal reason for donating a kidney; she just want to save a life.

“It was the best thing I ever did with my life,” she said. “I wish I had more; I would do it again.”