dr. cynthia cristofani. this was vanessa.ughing) >> i look at the video and i keep saying, "vanessa, take a breath, please" because we knew that a child of that age with an already narrow airway baseline who's not inhaling well, could easily lose consciousness from lack of oxygen and perhaps die. >> they're giving her oxygen. >> narrator: dr. cristofani opened the infant's airways and sucked copious secretions from her mouth. vanessa had pertussis, whooping cough. her status was so dire, a chaplain was brought into the er. >> vanessa was 40 days old when she was diagnosed with whooping cough. so we were probably a week away from having her vaccine for whooping cough. so the only thing that will prot ect a kid like that will be the herd immunity. and in that case, it failed. i mean, somebody in the community didn't vaccinate or, you know, got vanessa infected with it. >> narrator: vanessa survived, and the cdc traced her pertu ssis to an infected student at her brother's high school. for the very young and for the very old, sc