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What I haven’t seen any info on: Have any folks who had the disease as kids contracted it again. I’m wondering if getting the mumps as a kid confers an immunity that better protects from new strains.

I had the mumps as a kid, along with measles, chickenpox, and rubella (aka german measles). No recurrence. In order to understand disease and health, it's important to understand how your immune system works.

You are born with an innate immunity against disease, in large part thanks to your microbiome — healthy bacteria residing in your gut, on your skin, and in various mucosas, such as your nose and mouth.
These commensal bacteria protect you from invasion by potentially harmful microbes. If your innate immune system fails, infection will set in, and other immune cells take over the fight against the invading pathogen.
If this layer of your immune system also fails, your lymph nodes, spleen, and lymphatic organs can come into play. This is where the immune response develops long-term "memory" of the invading pathogen, ultimately resulting in long-term immunity once the infection has been successfully conquered.
Vaccines bypass the first two natural layers of protection provided by your innate immune system and early induced innate immune response, and move right into the third layer of your adaptive immune response.
The immunity provided by a vaccine, therefore, is very different from the natural immunity acquired from an active infection. For starters, it's only temporary, not life-long. READ MORE

BTW, when my daughter was 5, I intentionally brought her to play with my friend's children who were infected with chickenpox. She did not exhibit any reaction. Several years later, I repeated the process with another friend's infected children. Once again, she did not have a reaction. She is now 30. According to her doctor, she may have built up immunity simply through the exposure.

Another interesting note on building up natural immunity. Following the birth of my granddaughter, nurses in the hospital instructed my daughter to moisten the baby's pacifier in her mouth before placing it in the baby's mouthh.

First of all, please do not quote from anti-vax sites such as Mercola. Such sites typically mix real information with outright lies, and count on the fact that their target audience has no scientific training that would enable them to pick the real information from the false. If you want factual information on vaccines and immunity, based on the latest scientific research, there are plenty of good websites: for example CDC, Mayo Clinic, and PubMed (although PubMed is targeted at scientists who already have a deep understanding of the subject).

Every one of those diseases can cause severe, life-threatening illness. Prior to vaccines, child death was very common; millions of children still die of those diseases every year in countries where vaccines are not commonly available.

Rubella and chickenpox are especially bad for pregnant women. A fetus that catches either disease can die. Even if a fetus survives rubella, he or she can be permanently impaired from it--deafness, heart defects, brain damage, or visual impairment can result. Chickenpox can cause misformed limbs, scarring, visual problems, and brain damage.

In addition to the risk to fetuses, once you get chickenpox, you really do have it forever. It survives inside nerves. In one out of three people, the virus reactivates. Most commonly, it reactivates when the immune system starts to senesce (deteriorate) at about age 65; however, it can reactivate any time something happens to suppress the immune system. Stress is a major factor, because it suppresses the immune system and allows the virus to grow. Reactivated chickenpox virus is called "shingles." Shingles is unpleasant, and, depending on where the virus reactivates, can cause severe problems, including blindness and deafness if it affects facial nerves and gets into the eyes or ears. Plus, even after shingles clears up, the affected nerve may be permanently damaged, causing pain that may never go away. I had shingles 5 years ago; I still feel occasional sharp stabbing pains in my neck because of it.

Measles can cause severe illness, which is fatal to around 1 of 500 people who get it. Plus, it can cause a very dangerous encephalitis, resulting in brain damage to survivors. In about 1 in 8,000 cases, measles flares up again up to a decade after the original disease--and the flare up is lethal.

The bottom line is that these are not innocuous diseases. The impetus behind vaccine development has always been to prevent a considerable amount of morbidity and mortality.

Mercola quote:The immunity provided by a vaccine, therefore, is very different from the natural immunity acquired from an active infection. For starters, it's only temporary, not life-long.

To me, as a scientist, there may be some intellectual interest in how immunity differs when induced by a disease vs. by a vaccine. But to a patient, the real bottom line is that vaccines protect against disease.

The immune system is very complex, and I am not going to even start describing its intricacies (in part because I am a biochemist, not immunologist). That said, the duration of immunity is dependent on many, many factors. In some cases, it is longer-lasting if induced by the disease--in other cases, long-lasting immunity results only from the vaccine. When the CDC and WHO discuss and revise vaccine schedules, they take into account the scientific data on duration of immunity, and make recommendations based on that data. Thus, if immunity is known to wane, they recommend boosters.

I have never had measles or rubella. I had to get a measles vaccine in order to attend college; that was in 1987. When I went to Navy boot camp in 1980, a blood test showed that I was not immune to rubella, so I was vaccinated then. Fast-forward to two years ago, during my routine physical check-up, when I was tested for immunity to measles and rubella. I'm still immune. Awesome, I don't have to be vaccinated again!

Let me explain a little about how viruses work. Viruses enter cells and convert them into virus factories. Once a cell is converted, it never returns to its normal function. Usually, the cell dies, either because it breaks open once it is full of new virus particles, or because the immune system's killer T cells recognize that it is infected and kill it. In a tissue such as skin or the mucous membranes, the dead cells are quickly replaced because those tissues are constantly growing. However, in other tissues, such as the heart (which grows slowly) or the brain (which barely grows at all), once those infected cells die, they are not replaced. This results in permanent damage. Another outcome of viral infection is not that the infected cell dies, but that the virus incorporates itself into the cell--often inserting itself into the DNA and genetically changing the cell. Warts are one example of this--the wart is full of viral DNA that is incorporated into the cell's DNA, and this causes a visible change in the affected cells. In other cases, the change in the cell might not be as visible, but can result in a cancer--many cancers are caused by variants of the papillomavirus (the wart virus), and other viruses also cause cancer.

While anti-vax sites try to downplay the seriousness of infectious disease and exaggerate the side-effects of vaccines, ask yourself: do you think that EV-68, the emerging polio-like virus, is an innocuous childhood infection, that it is no big deal if it spreads to the point where every child in the country risks becoming ill from it? Was Ebola just a mild infection that was no more than an inconvenience to those who caught it? If you get bit by a wild animal that was behaving oddly, will you just shrug it off because, after all, rabies is just a virus? You need to be suspicious of the motives of those anti-vaxxers who try to dissuade you from using vaccines to protect yourself and your children from disease. They are up to no good.