Whooping cough ordeal for baby Mia
(Daily mail March 5, 2001
KATE WINSLET had to race her baby to hospital after she was diagnosed with potentially fatal whooping cough.
The 25-year-old actress was advised to take baby Mia in for observation and treatment.
Mia, now nearly five months old, is happy and healthy and back at home with Kate and her director husband Jim Threapleton.
Friends of the actress said that she had been ‘distraught’ with worry about the baby, her first, when she was told in January that what had appeared to be a cold was in fact something far more serious. - -
The incubation period for whooping cough is usually about a fortnight. It starts in the same way as a cold with a runny nose, weeping eyes and a cough.
Later, the patient is racked by coughing fits which have a distinctive ‘whooping’ sound, and vomiting. Convalescence takes a month or two.
Because the disease can be fatal, most children are immunised against it from the age of two months, and it is now rare. Mia caught whooping cough despite having the immunisation.
A friend said: ‘Kate and Jim made sure she had the injections but it was just one of those unusual things?
When Mia was born In October, Kate said: ‘She’s gorgeous. It’s the most amazing thing. Before, it was
just Jim and me and now it’s Jim, me and Mia and it feels the most natural thing in the world - the perfect family.’
Kate has taken time off since Mia was born but next month she starts work on her next film, which is being shot at Shepperton, close to her home in the Home Counties.
The film, an adaptation of Zola’s novel Therese Raquin, is a story of illicit passion, murder and guilt.
Kate is one actress who seems to be at peace with her curves, but since Mia’s birth she has been dieting to regain her figure.
‘I’d like to get a bit of the baby weight off or I won’t work,’ she has said.
‘It’s so insane and bloody boring. I despise myself for it.’