Epidemic Parotitis AKA Mumps

Courtesy of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Mumps is an acute infectious disease caused by a virus that mainly attacks glandular and nervous tissues, frequently characterized by swelling of the salivary glands.

Mumps Virus

The disease is worldwide in distribution and can occur in epidemics. Its incidence is highest between the ages of 5 and 9, but mumps may attack persons of any age. Because the salivary gland most often affected is the parotid, mumps is also known as epidemic Parotitis. The disease rarely involves the sex glands, the meninges, or the pancreas.

Mumps is spread from person to person by droplets sprayed from the respiratory tract of infected persons, and it is highly contagious. The incubation period of the disease varies from 15 to 21 days.

In children, the first symptoms are usually a mild fever, a feeling of illness and chilliness, loss of appetite, and dryness of the throat. This is followed by soreness and swelling around the ears, and a higher fever. These symptoms are usually gone by 12 days. In adult males, inflammation of the testes occurs in up to 20 percent of the cases, but resultant sterility is rare. In children, infection of the auditory nerve can cause deafness, but this is also a rare result.

A person exposed to the mumps virus is usually quarantined. Most people that have mumps have it in a mild form, however, that if it is not even recognized early, they still acquire immunity to the disease. A preventive vaccine was licensed in 1967 has allowed the number of cases in the United States to be brought down to less than 5000 cases.

Few fatalities result from the mumps virus. Once a person is attacked this usually results in complete immunity, because only one antigenic type of virus causes this disease in the body.

The most effective way of the prevention of the mumps virus is to have your system prepared for mumps. This is called immunization, which allows your body the necessary information to allow your immune system to trigger and to destroy the invader.