Mumps Vaccination

sillymoo

*First off i'm not asking for medical advice*

Quite a few people I know have gotten the mumps recently. The most amazing thing is that they all got all their vaccinations and now have come down with the mumps. And they would all have been born within the same year. Can anyone come up with any reasons that this might be happening? Is there a new more virulent strain of the mumps? I know they would have gotten their boosters around the time the schedule changed, could this have contributed to this?

DrIndy

Although they all got their vaccinations - Did they get everything except the MMR?

taram

When did they get the booster? 12-ish or when they entered college? I was reccomended to have both boosters. Ofc there'll be a tiny percentage it won't take in, but very unlikely it happened to a few people at once.

I know that one friend who had mumps got it from her canadian friends, might be a slightly different strain or something?

sillymoo

Yes they would have gotten all their MMR vaccines, when they were babies and then a booster when they started in secondary school. I think this the only difference to the old schedule, for example I am a bit older and would have gotten my booster in 5th/6th class. The college health service are speculating that this outbreak may have something to do with the changover from giving the booster in primary to giving it in secondary school. This just struck me as quite odd and got me thinking about it.

tallaght01

I don't know anything about the individual case, but mumps is on the rise in most places, and cases are getting older.

I guess there's a few issues that can affect your vulnerability. A lot of people haven't had their booster. Single dose MMR can give full immunity to as little as 60% of the population. But two doses gives about 95% protection.

BUt, even if you have your 2 doses, you still have a 1 in 20 chance of getting it if you're exposed to a case. That means, if there's a case around, they might infect 1 case in every 20 people they meet. If you're statistically unlucky, it could be 2 or 3 out of that 20.

Herd immunity is based around this idea. If 90% of the population are fully immunised, them maybe 5% of the unimmunised 10% will get the disease. That's half a percent. They're easier to manage/isolate, and their limited contact mean they'll only be in contact with a few of the immuised cohort.

If only 60% of the population are immunised, then any outbreak will spread like wildlfire. It also means that 20-30% of the population could get the illness (if it's highly contagious, like measles). This 30% are likely to, between them, have contact with virtually every kid in the immunsied group. So, the immunised kids have more chance of being exposed to a case.

I don't know of that makes sense. I guess to sum up, what I'm trying to say is that we deal with the "non responders" (ie those who don't form immunity when vaccinated) by trying to keep them away from infected people. If the rest of the poulation are immunised, then that becomes a lot easier.