Trained by D. Wayne Lukas, Houston was a very good racehorse, but unfortunately for him, he raced in the 1989 Triple Crown races the same year as Sunday Silence and Easy Goer, and thus he was completely overmatched and overshadowed.
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In a sharp reversal of recent years and decades, pertussis or whooping cough is again on the rise in this country.
It is potentially very dangerous to young children, but even older children are getting it:
The death rate today from pertussis is a far cry from the 1920s, when, according to the CDC, about 6,000 children died each year from the disease -- more than from diphtheria, scarlet fever and measles combined._____
The vaccine was developed in the 1930s and came into wider use in the '40s. The number of reported cases took a dive from 156,517 in 1947 to 74,715 in 1948.
The lowest number of reported cases, according to the CDC, was 1,010 in 1976. But in 2003 -- after decades in which reported cases numbered in the thousands -- cases shot up into the tens of thousands, where they have remained.
The rise in reported cases may be due in part to better tests and increased awareness. But it's clear this year that more 13- and 14-year-olds are contracting the disease.
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