Caroline Brown, a sophomore at the University of Missouri, got a fever over Thanksgiving break. Soon it became painful to bite down, and her cheek began to swell. A trip to her physician confirmed it: She had the mumps.
“Mumps kind of sounds like this archaic thing,” Brown said. “We get vaccinated for it; it just sounds like something that nobody gets. So I just didn’t think that it was possible that I would get it.”
But mumps is back and is having its worst year in a decade, fueled in part by its spread on college campuses. Since classes began at the University of Missouri in August, school officials have identified 193 mumps cases on campus. Nationwide, more than 4,000 cases have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — nearly triple the number in 2015 and the largest increase in 10 years.
Some public health officials are asking questions about the vaccine protocol.
Dr. Susan Even, executive director of the University of Missouri’s Student Health Center, said she hasn’t seen anything like the current outbreak in her 31 years at the school. She said all of the students her team treated for mumps had two MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine doses — a school requirement — but they got sick anyway.
“The fact that we have mumps showing up in highly immunized populations likely reflects something about the effectiveness of the vaccine,” Even said.
Outbreaks are affecting several other universities. More than 300 cases were reported at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and students at universities such as Iowa State, Tufts and Harvard have also had mumps.
The largest current outbreak is in Arkansas, which reports over 2,000 cases among school-age children and adults throughout the state since August this year.
Mumps is no longer particularly common, and it rarely causes serious complications. However, there is no treatment for the viral illness except rest. Symptoms include swelling in the cheek and neck, fever and pain in the jaw, which can be alleviated by over-the-counter medications.
The symptoms might feel like flu at first, “but the characteristic that we look for is pain in the jaw and cheek area and swelling,” Even said.
Dr. Janell Routh, a medical epidemiologist for the CDC who specializes in mumps, said it’s not surprising that outbreaks are occurring on college campuses, where students often live in close quarters, eat together and party together.
“College campuses provide that perfect medium for the spread of the mumps virus,” Routh said. “We know a lot of the behaviors that take place on college campuses are amenable to the spread.”
The outbreak in Arkansas has been affecting a more diverse population — school-age children and adults.
Dr. Dirk Haselow, the state’s epidemiologist and medical director of outbreak response, said the state’s health department has been holding clinics in places like churches and schools to dispense the MMR vaccine.