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outbreak of mumps
Doctors put on alert for mumps outbreak
Midwestern states have reported more than 600 cases this year.
By Jennifer L. Boen
An outbreak of mumps in Iowa that has spread to at least three states near Indiana prompted the Fort Wayne-Allen County Department of Health to alert area doctors Thursday.
Mumps, for which a vaccine became available in 1967, is a disease today?s young physicians may never have seen except in medical textbooks. The outbreak has turned federal and state health officials into detectives, unraveling how it started and why. In the majority of cases, the mumps showed up in people who had been vaccinated as children.
More than 600 cases - 515 in Iowa and 100-plus scattered in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas ? have been reported this year. That?s three times what the entire country sees in a typical year, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The last significant outbreak occurred between Oct. 1, 1988, and April 1, 1989, when 269 cases were reported in Kansas. |