As mumps spreads across the Midwest, Northwestern health officials are preparing for the illness’s arrival at NU by informing students and encouraging them to get vaccinated.
“It’s hard to imagine it’s not coming,” said Dr. Donald Misch, director of health services. “If we get lucky and don’t have any cases, great, but the odds are we probably will.”
The outbreak is centered in Iowa, and 1,300 U.S. cases have been reported over the last few months, The New York Times reported Sunday. As of April 21, 123 potential cases had been counted in Illinois, according to the Associated Press, including some in Cook County.
University Health Service sent a schoolwide e-mail early last Friday about the mumps outbreak. That morning, Searle had at least eight visitors come in to ask questions about the illness, Misch said. Another e-mail will probably be sent if anyone at NU contracts the illness, he said.
Illinois state law requires that students receive the first of two recommended mumps vaccines, usually the MMR vaccine, or Measles, Mumps and Rubella, Misch said. The first vaccine is 80 percent effective in preventing mumps, while the second dose increases the effectiveness to 90 percent, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Even though nobody who is vaccinated is entirely immune, the reason behind the current outbreak is still unknown, Misch said.
NU is trying to encourage students who have only been vaccinated once to get the second dose, he said. Most American children get both, but there are some NU students who do not have a vaccine at all, he said.
“There are some students who have slipped through our compliance cracks,” Misch said.
Searle has been scouring their records and contacting individual students who have not been vaccinated, he said.
There is no way for Searle to tell if part-time students and employees were vaccinated, though, because they do not fall under the university’s health care supervision.
Accordingly, employees would have to go to a private health care practitioner to get vaccines, though Misch said the university might create a program through Human Resources that would help employees get the vaccines through a third party.
Misch said colleges have been the focus of the outbreak because students live in such close quarters.
Beth Delorit, a Weinberg and Music sophomore, said she thought the risks might have been exaggerated.
“I’m not concerned,” she said. “There are so many things that people can be afraid of.”
Karin Dalsgaard, a Music graduate student from Denmark, said she was not sure if she had been vaccinated but thought the vaccine might have been one she had to get before coming to the U.S. She felt sick this weekend, and her friend joked that she should check if it was mumps, she said.
Mumps begins with symptoms of general illness – fever, headache or cold symptoms – but is most easily identifiable when the glands in front of and below the ears swell significantly. This usually happens one to two days after the first symptoms appear, Misch said.
Mumps is generally not fatal, but the disease can cause complications such as meningitis and inflammation of the testicles. The meningitis that comes from mumps is not the same as meningococcal meningitis, which is often fatal and is prevented with a different vaccine.
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