Mumps
May 2005 - The Department of Health is urging that
all children and young adults are fully immunised against mumps even if they are older than the recommended age range. This is due to the rapid rise in the incidence of mumps in the UK in recent years.
The Health Protection Agency (HPA) said 28,470 cases were notified in the first four months of this year (2005), almost all of which were expected to be confirmed as true cases of mumps. This is compared to 1,529 confirmed cases in England and Wales last year, which was three times the figure in 2002, and double the number in 2001.
During the early 1990s as a result of the introduction of the MMR vaccine, cases of mumps dropped rapidly. This also means that today's 18 to 22-year-olds have not had the chance to build up a natural immunity. Students are particularly vulnerable. Many of those born between 1983 and 1986 were not properly immunised as children because they were too young for the triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and did not properly take the double dose of the individual vaccines.
Universities have been particularly badly hit with many offering campus immunisation.
In the UK, mumps epidemics used to occur in the winter and spring months every few years. MMR vaccination of 1 year olds was started in 1988, coinciding with a preschool catch-up programme. Mumps became notifiable at that time, and its incidence fell drastically during the 1990s.
Papers in the British Medical Journal set out the scale of the outbreak and Dr Ravindra Gupta, from Guy's and St Thomas's Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, has spoken about the urgent need for immunisation programmes.
The BMJ research also showed a rise in cases among very young children, following a controversial debate in Britain about a possible link between MMR and autism in young children. The BMJ said uptake of MMR injections among two-year-olds had fallen from around 92% in the mid-1990s to around 80% in 2004. In some areas of London the proportion of young children receiving the jab had dropped to 60%.
 Mumps is an enveloped, single stranded RNA virus belonging to the paramyxoviridae family .
Infection and replication occurs when the virus fuses with the cell membrane allowing the viral genome to enter the cytoplasm. Fusion of infected cells occurs though the F protein to form characteristic syncytia
(multi-nucleate cells)
. Virus release occurs from the cell by budding.
www.vaccineinformation.org/ mumps/photos.asp
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