children s health issues
Mumps
Introduction
Mumps is a contagious viral infection that causes painful enlargement of the salivary glands. The infection may also affect the testes, brain, and pancreas, especially in adolescents and adults. Mumps is caused by a virus. Symptoms include chills, headache, poor appetite, fever, and a feeling of illness, followed by swelling of the salivary glands. The diagnosis is based on typical symptoms. Treatment is aimed at relieving symptoms. Most children recover with no problems, but infection can lead to meningitis or encephalitis. Routine vaccination can prevent the infection. Children become infected with mumps by breathing in small airborne droplets of moisture coughed out by an infected person or by having direct contact with objects contaminated by infected saliva. The infection does not usually occur in children younger than 2 years, particularly those younger than 1 year. One infection with the mumps virus usually provides lifelong immunity, which means a person who has had mumps once most likely will not get it again. Mumps is less contagious than Measles . In heavily populated areas, it occurs year-round but is most frequent in late winter and early spring. Outbreaks mainly occur among people who have not been vaccinated and have not had mumps before. However, outbreaks have occurred among people who have been vaccinated, probably because some people do not develop immunity after vaccination and, in some others, immunity may decrease over time. Also, some people may not have received the recommended number of vaccine doses. Before routine immunization, mumps occurred most commonly among school-aged children. Now, however, the infection has become more common among adolescents and adults because of waning immunity. Vaccination has significantly decreased the number of mumps cases in the United States. However, mumps still occurs at low rates. A 2006 mumps outbreak in the United States caused 6,584 cases . Since that time, sporadic outbreaks, mainly at college campuses and in other close-knit communities, have contributed to cases fluctuating from a low of 229 in 2012 to another high of 6,369 in 2016. These outbreaks have highlighted the need for continued use of vaccination. Like measles, mumps may be spread by people traveling from areas where mumps is more common and acquiring mumps while abroad before returning to the United States. These infected travelers then transmit the infection, especially in places where many people group together (such as college campuses) or among people in close-knit communities that live in crowded conditions or that limit contact with outsiders. 