How contagious is Mumps?
Mumps
Mumps is highly contagious and spreads rapidly among people living in close quarters.[7] The virus is transmitted by respiratory droplets or direct contact with an infected person.[2] Only humans get and spread the disease.[1] People are infectious to each other from about seven days before the start of symptoms to about eight days after.[8] Once an infection has run its course, a person is typically immune for life.[1] Reinfection is possible but the ensuing infection tends to be mild.[9] Diagnosis is usually suspected due to parotid swelling and can be confirmed by isolating the virus on a swab of the parotid duct.[2] Testing for IgM antibodies in the blood is simple and may be useful; however, it can be falsely negative in those who have been immunized.[2]
MMR vaccine controversy
After vaccination rates dropped, the incidence of two of the three diseases increased greatly in the UK. In 1998 there were 56 confirmed cases of measles in the UK; in 2006 there were 449 in the first five months of the year, with the first death since 1992; cases occurred in inadequately vaccinated children. Mumps cases began rising in 1999 after years of very few cases, and by 2005 the United Kingdom was in a mumps epidemic with almost 5000 notifications in the first month of 2005 alone. The age group affected was too old to have received the routine MMR immunisations around the time the paper by Wakefield "et al." was published, and too young to have contracted natural mumps as a child, and thus to achieve a herd immunity effect. With the decline in mumps that followed the introduction of the MMR vaccine, these individuals had not been exposed to the disease, but still had no immunity, either natural or vaccine induced. Therefore, as immunisation rates declined following the controversy and the disease re-emerged, they were susceptible to infection. Measles and mumps cases continued in 2006, at incidence rates 13 and 37 times greater than respective 1998 levels. Two children were severely and permanently injured by measles encephalitis despite undergoing kidney transplantation in London.