- Hello, Jeff - There is something unnatural
about this outbreak. I am going to be looking even closer at it and will
keep you updated.
-
- Those becoming infected appear to be,
well...most of them, vaccinated individuals - many of whom have even had
booster shots. The virus (as I mentioned briefly last night,) has mutated
away from that which the vaccines cover. Just how did this mutation take
place and why is it not being discussed?
-
- Evidently this so-called 'slight' mutation
is rendering vaccine useless. Again, I ask, is this by design? If someone
wanted to use a bioweapon against the US, why not use something like mumps?
It is easy to transmit, easy to possess - certainly easier than trying
to obtain one of the bioagents on the list of bioweapons. And if the weaponeer
has the strain mutation, they can formulate a vaccine for it and make a
bundle.
-
- This outbreak appears to be affecting
mainly white people, especially in universities. As they say, this whole
epidemic "ain't kosher." And, no, I don't believe there's a
bioterrorist under every rock. This outbreak bears close scrutiny and
careful monitoring.
-
- Patty
-
- Mumps Makes A Comeback In
The Midwest
-
- By Mary Carmichael
- Newsweek
- 4-21-6
-
- April 21, 2006 - A few weeks ago Ashley
Ramirez was visiting a couple of close friends in Omaha, Neb., who were
hospitalized following a car accident when she started running a fever
and noticed a small lump on her neck. By the next day the lump was "completely
massive" and the University of Iowa student was a patient in the hospital
herself, hopped up on pain meds and waiting on a diagnosis that baffled
doctors couldn't give her. Still sick, she returned to the University of
Iowa and took to bed; when friends came by, they teased her for trying
to eke out a few words through her cheeks, now swollen like a chipmunk's.
By the time her doctors finally called her days later with test results,
hundreds of kids across the Midwest were suffering similar symptoms, and
Ramirez knew she was one of the unlucky ones. "They told me, 'you
have the mumps,'" she says, "and I was like, 'Yeah, thanks, I
kind of figured that out.'"
-
- For the last three weeks, mumps, a virus
many people think of as an early-20th-century disease of children, has
been moving through Midwestern college towns like so many spring tornadoes.
The largest U.S. eruption of the disease in 20 years has sickened 1,165
people and counting in eight states; seven other states are investigating
whether they may have caught the same strain. Although doctors said last
week that some recent cases in North Dakota and Michigan were not linked
to the larger Midwestern outbreak, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
officials announced Thursday that the epidemic was indeed "unstable"
and spreading, and that they couldn't predict where it would show up next.
It has already made it as far west as Nebraska--assuming a possible case
in California turns out to be a false alarm--and as far east as Indiana.
"It's a cascade of transmission that's going to take a while to curtail
and stop," says CDC Director Julie Gerberding. "We are expecting
more cases, definitely."
-
- At the beginning of this year, Gerberding
anticipated no more than 200 or 300 cases nationwide. But that was before
the epidemic got going. Officials haven't identified "patient zero,"
or the first case in the United States, but they think the key to the disease's
spread was air travel. In late March, according to the CDC, two infected
people took a series of nine connecting flights through the Midwest. Terry
Poe Buschkamp, 51, was one of them; she flew from Waterloo, Iowa, through
Minneapolis, Detroit and Washington, D.C. Learning of the mumps outbreak
on her return, she went to the doctor and learned she might have unwittingly
played a role--she hadn't known until then that she was infected. The other
traveler has not been identified, but he flew from Tucson, Ariz., to Dallas,
then through Fayetteville, Ark.; St. Louis; and finally Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
-
- The fact that the travelers touched down
mainly in the Midwest probably explains why that region is suffering the
most. (Coincidentally, the last big mumps epidemic, in the 1980s, also
centered on the Midwest.) So far, Iowa has been hit the hardest; it would
only see five mumps cases in a normal year, but the state accounts for
more than 800 of this year's 1,100-odd victims. In Waterloo, Iowa, Buschkamp's
hometown of about 70,000 people, even the mayor has the mumps. Kansas,
Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Indiana and Nebraska have all
also confirmed that the same mumps strain is circulating there.
-
- The outbreak started with older victims
and can target people of any age--Sharon Watson of the Kansas Department
of Health and Environment says her state has seen cases "from age
5 to age 90"--but it has largely hit young, otherwise healthy college
students. Almost 35 percent of the early cases occurred in 19-year-olds.
Mumps is spread by coughing and sneezing, and victims also are contagious
for three days before they develop symptoms, so the close quarters of college
are a naturally vulnerable site for the virus to spread. "This happened
on spring break, and it's very easy to unwittingly spread it," Watson
says. If the disease hasn't retreated by summer, kids leaving school could
cause another wave of infection in parts of the country that thus far remain
unaffected.
-
- Once a rite of passage in childhood,
mumps was largely tamped down in the 1960s with the advent of a vaccine,
and it hasn't been a major public health problem for two decades. Epidemiologists
think several factors may have caused its return. On is that the measles,
mumps and rubella shot needs to be given twice in order to be most effective,
and some parents are neglecting to take their child in for the second treatment.
Another is that some parents, responding to fears that the vacines could
be linked to autism, are simply not getting the shots at all for their
children. "Lots of pediatricians have bemoaned the fact that parents
are either not paying attention or [are] actually opposed to vaccination,"
says Dr. John Baldwin, president of the CBR Institute for Biomedical Research,
a Harvard-affiliated immunology center. Many states require full double
vaccination for entry into any state school, but a significant number of
students in Iowa started college before that requirement took effect in
the early 1990s. And even double vaccination doesn't take care of everything;
about 10 percent of kids who go through it still end up getting mumps.
-
- Doctors may also have been misdiagnosing
some kids for years, says Watson: the baseline level of mumps in the population
might be higher than we've realized. The most common symptoms of mumps
are fever, headache and swollen salivary glands under the jaw, symptoms
that could easily be mistaken for something else. "There may have
been some assumptions on the part of clinicians that the vaccine had eliminated
the disease and therefore they didn't have to check for it," Watson
says. "But just because a kid has been vaccinated doesn't rule it
out." Finally, there's the possibility that a mutation has occurred
in the mumps virus, making it more likely to spread. That's usually what
happens in the case of outbreaks like this, says Baldwin. On the other
hand, mumps mutates more slowly than many other viruses. Perhaps, says
Baldwin, that's why we haven't seen an epidemic in 20 years.
-
- Controlling the outbreak from now on
will be difficult, in no small part because doctors thought they'd been
doing enough all along to keep the disease under control. The Iowa Department
of Public Health announced last week that it would set up emergency mass-vaccination
clinics in college towns across the state, and Watson says Kansas has already
dispatched 10,000 doses of vaccine to its hardest-hit counties. But those
plans won't rein in the epidemic completely, because many of the kids who've
caught mumps were already vaccinated against it; they were the 10 percent
for whom the vaccine didn't work. Mumps is almost never fatal, but there
is no medical cure. As with many other viruses, the only effective weapons
against it are bed rest, fluids, painkillers--and the only thing that will
likely put a full stop to this epidemic: time.
-
- © 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12425647/site/newsweek/
-
- Patricia A. Doyle DVM, PhD
- Bus Admin, Tropical Agricultural Economics
- Univ of West Indies
-
- Please visit my "Emerging Diseases"
message board at:
- http://www.emergingdisease.org/phpbb/index.php
- Also my new website:
- http://drpdoyle.tripod.com/
- Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa
- Go with God and in Good Health
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