Mumps Outbreak Spreading Through One Long Island Beach Town
![[NY] Mumps Outbreak Spreading Through One Long Island Beach Town](http://media.nbcnewyork.com/images/620*349/mumps+long+island.jpg)
Posted on 11/12/2016 7:12:46 AM PST by NYer
Thirteen cases of mumps have now been confirmed at the State University of New York at New Paltz, an increase of four since last week.
At least eight members of the school's intercollegiate swim team, along with one athletics staff member, are among the sick. Swim practices and workouts were suspended as a precaution at the onset of the initial outbreak.
It's not clear if the additional four cases are connected to the mumps spread on the swim team, which county health officials first learned of a month ago.
Last week, college health officials sent a letter to users of the school's athletic facilities cautioning them about possible infection.
Mumps is a highly contagious viral disease characterized by fever, headache and swelling of the salivary glands. Other symptoms include low-grade fever, fatigue, muscle aches and loss of appetite. After a person is exposed, symptoms usually appear 16 to 18 days after infection, but this period can range from 12-25 days after infection. Mumps can't be treated.
The affected students, who have been immunized against mumps, have been isolated for the recommended period of time.
Twenty students who have not been immunized have been sent home until December.
Campus tours and general information sessions will proceed as scheduled, according to the Daily Freeman of Kingston, but residence halls home to affected students will be avoided for the time being.
The indication in the article was that those who were vaccinated relied on the body's immune system to provide antibodies; for some unknown reason, no antibodies produced.
No indication of booster shots.
Those immediately impacted were all members of the swimming team, with various others (friends, girlfriends, etc.) possibly exposed.
The information contained in the article was somewhat superficial and didn't provide much additional information.
Yes it was quite lacking in details. If correct that no antibodies formed, that makes me wonder if the vaccine or protocol was somehow defective. Mumps is so contagious, It’s hard to understand why there would not be antibodies.
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.
Thanks for the ping! Guess what I’m trying to figure out is whether we have a mumps problem, a vaccine problem, or both.
Guess if I’m anything, it’s pro-informed consent. And I can see the need for vaccination requirements, but only for certain diseases. Not convinced mumps is one of them.
I had them all as well. I don’t remember it being a big deal either. I was born in 1955.
Thanks, that is an interesting article. Although I try to catch the MMWR every week, I am so busy these days that I simply have not had time.
What that article really told me is that more studies need to be done to establish the level of long-term immunity conferred by the vaccine. Vaccinating after the outbreak has already peaked may be of limited utility; it takes about two weeks for immunity to peak following a vaccination, which means that some people receiving the vaccine after they have already been exposed might not benefit from it. This strategy (called “ring vaccination) has been successful in the past—smallpox was eliminated through ring vaccination during the last outbreak. In the case of mumps, however, the evidence does not support or fail to support using a ring vaccination strategy to control disease outbreaks.
The fact that the mumps vaccine only provides 88% coverage after two doses means that outbreaks will always be a concern. There is a real challenge in developing vaccines that immunize close to 100% of patients—88% might be all that is possible with mumps.
In a situation where there is a low, but not absent, level of disease transmission, what frequently happens is that people are revaccinated through exposure to the disease. Their exposure is not high enough to cause the disease, but is sufficient to cause their immune system to kick in, resulting in better immunity to the disease. As diseases are eliminated from circulation, the revaccination process due to natural exposure does not occur, and thus, immunity to the disease wanes and leaves the person susceptible to actually catching the disease.
Maybe we should also be asking whether we should be vaccinating for every disease just because there’s a vaccine available for it.
A certain number of people who have had mumps do get it again, but I do not know the rate of reinfection.
There are a few studies on reinfection with mumps, but too few for me to read them and extract any generalized information from them. The best I can say is that immunity against one strain of mumps does not necessarily confer immunity to another strain. This helps to explain why the vaccine provides only 88% coverage after two doses.
If there is not a real need for it, vaccination is not recommended. Vaccines are not cheap, so why spend limited healthcare dollars vaccinating against diseases that are not a threat?
If you travel, however, you may be exposed to diseases that do not exist in the US, and so should take appropriate vaccinations.
I am up-to-date on all of the recommended vaccines. But I went to Asia recently, and had to be vaccinated against several diseases: Japanese encephalitis, anthrax, rabies, and smallpox. Under normal circumstances, I would never be exposed to any of those diseases. I should point out that smallpox is eliminated, but there are other pox viruses out there, and the vaccine will protect against them. I am happy to say that I did not get sick during my trip, despite the fact that my tour guide had a nasty cold, and the hygiene in some of the places I visited was not up to American standards.
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.
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.
I had shingles at age 12, and it was stress related. I had 2 recurrences of it later in life, both times on the same nerve. So I am very familiar with shingles.
Thanks for the ping Irish...
Sometimes I feel like I might be a 'pain in the azz'
but I firmly believe that an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.. AFTER THE EFFECT !
If there is a communicable disease in the NorthEast, and you live in middle America, some may not consider it relevant.
On the other hand, you may have a family member attending school in the NorthEast, and if you are older, perhaps with a suppressed immune system,
such exposure could be potentially deadly to you.
We FReepers are part of an information highway; I believe it is better to be informed and staying healthy, especially with this outgoing administration,
which has already demonstrated a blatant disregard for its citizenry by introducing exotic and previously treated diseases which no longer exist here.
Thanks for the kudos ! Much appreciated !
Could it be because their generation were the first to experience the onslaught of "a vaccine for anything that ails you"?
I have researched the vaccine injury issue, testified on it in open Court, under oath and under x-examination in a family Court matter (and prevailed to a degree unheard of in the environment, I have been told), read numerous books on vaccines both pro- and con-, and spoken to the experts. Some vaccines are OK, but the number, frequency and age at which they are delivered is a problem. The ingredients are a massive problem, as numerous research conferences (simpsonwood etc) have pointed out, if one reads carefully. Multiple adjuvants have a multiplicative insult effect on children, even if some do not immediately show signs of vaccine injury.
We are the most heavily vaccinated country in the world, and yet we have some of the most unhealthy children in the developed world. Travel internationally and see.
You say that the Poling case was a tiny incidence. You are wrong. The experts who work with vaccine injured children tell me that it could be as high as 35%, and that is just for that one genetic predisposition. At minimum, why not run the MTHFR and urine organic acid tests on every child prior to vaccination? At minimum, why not take dietary precautions before and after vaccination to help protect the child? These are reasonable steps, but to someone who is all-in with the sacred cow of vaccination, this is blasphemy. Oh wait, it isn’t the “standard of care”, the same vile excuse used to not recommend that every child be tested for blood levels of vitamin D.
The idiots in the medical establishment claim that diagnosis is the reason autism rates have skyrocketed. Okay, so where are all the hundreds of thousands of previously undiagnosed autistic adults, folks who cannot speak and who bang their heads on walls (etc)??
“It is “normal” to be afraid of shots. But what they are missing is the diagnosis of overt neuropathy, encephalitis or brain dysfunction, because high pitched crying is not normal. Brain damage from vaccines is epidemic and yet, doctors are slow to diagnose neurological disorders (in US) when vaccinations are at stake but we see many citations linking changes (for the worse) after vaccinations are given.”
If they aren’t already in place, just wait until the DSM-V changes in diagnosis are implemented. At lot of children will be left without care, and their parents will be bankrupted. This will be a disaster for the Republic.
The good thing is that in the homeschooling movement, Christian schools, and the natural food movement (which includes folks from all across the political and religious spectrum) are talking about this, and in many cases, taking action in their own families and communities.
You're doing important work here Irish - - it's appreciated...
What, exactly, do you call "research"? Given the overall tone of your post, I suspect that what you call research is actually memorizing anti-vax screeds from the several anti-vax websites that are out there.
True research on vaccines takes place in the lab and the clinic. I read the medical literature to learn what the actual research says. Decisions on the optimal vaccine schedule, dosage, etc., are not made by people reciting anti-vax propaganda in a courtroom, but by professional researchers and physicians discussing the actual scientifically determined characteristics of vaccines.
We are the most heavily vaccinated country in the world, and yet we have some of the most unhealthy children in the developed world. Travel internationally and see.
What is that even supposed to mean?
International vaccine guidelines published by the World Health Organization are remarkably similar to the US guidelines published by the CDC. In certain countries, vaccines that are not routinely distributed in the US are added to the schedule to protect against diseases endemic in those countries. Thus, the statement (probably pulled from some anti-vax site) that we are "the most vaccinated country in the world" is demonstrably false. As is the statement that we have "some of the most unhealthy children in the developed world." Using as a citation for that statement the admonition to "travel internationally and see" is a no-go. If you want to make the claim that American children are less healthy than children in other developed countries, you have to state what the health indicators you are looking at are, while recognizing that a lot of factors affect health. How much exercise do American children get, as compared to their western European or eastern Asian counterparts? What are their diets? Etc.
ou say that the Poling case was a tiny incidence. You are wrong. The experts who work with vaccine injured children tell me that it could be as high as 35%, and that is just for that one genetic predisposition. At minimum, why not run the MTHFR and urine organic acid tests on every child prior to vaccination?
Ah, how clever. Coming up with some tests promoted by the alternative-to-medicine quacks and then claiming that actual trained physicians are derelict in their practices by not promoting those same quack tests.
The fact is that what happened with Hannah Poling was a direct result of her mitochondrial abnormality, and the outcome would have occurred regardless of her vaccination status. The fact that the triggering event was the fever and mild rash she got following the measles vaccine is almost irrelevant; any febrile illness would have triggered the brain damage. It really was a matter of time for her.
I'm not going to provide a full scientific debunking of the other misinformation you posted; the problem with misinformation and lies is that they are ridiculously easy to invent in quantities that soon overwhelm the ability of scientists to debunk. And that, of course, is the goal of pseudoscientists. They can learn a few scientific words, write volumes of mumbo-jumbo full of $20 words, and people whose science "education" might be high school chemistry lap it up and send them all kinds of money for their worthless books and "supplements." Perhaps you can guess--I have no respect or patience for the alternative-to-medicine industry.
The idiots in the medical establishment claim that diagnosis is the reason autism rates have skyrocketed. Okay, so where are all the hundreds of thousands of previously undiagnosed autistic adults, folks who cannot speak and who bang their heads on walls (etc)??
When the diagnostic criteria are changed, the diagnostic rates also change. People that were formerly diagnosed as mentally retarded or having some mental illness are now diagnosed as autistic. So diagnosis rates of other mental disorders have decreased at the same time that diagnosis rates of autism spectrum disorders have increased. And if a disorder now considered to be part of the autism spectrum is given a different name in the future, the rates of diagnosis will change again to reflect that.
You ask where the autistic kids of the past were? They were in the same places they are now. Either they lived with their families, or they lived in institutions. Society's views on keeping mentally disabled people at home vs. in institutions changes over time, so the number of such children seen by the general public also changes over time. My mother worked in a state institution for the mentally retarded--I saw plenty of mentally disabled children.
Autism is a result of genetic abnormalities; the evidence points to the involvement of multiple genes. While anti-vaxxers are *still* trying to push the discredited claim that vaccines cause autism, scientists are busy teasing out the details of the genetic profiles associated with autism. What will anti-vaxxers do when the multiple gene abnormalities involved in causing the autism spectrum disorders are finally mapped out? How will they convince parents to refuse to vaccinate their children and leave them susceptible to brain damage and death resulting from infectious disease? How can they possibly get humans to voluntarily die off and reduce the excess population that is killing the planet if they can't fear-monger about vaccines?
Your entire post drips with the kind of elitist mentality that many of us are sick of hearing.
“What, exactly, do you call “research”?”
The kind of balanced research that a thoughtful, responsible parent considering a conscience/religious exemption would do. Reading the pro-vaccine books that the ped recommended, which don’t provide any meaningful information to make an informed decision, and the alternative ones, which for the most part do provide meaningful information to make an informed decision.
“True research on vaccines takes place in the lab and the clinic.”
There are no independent funded, long-term double blinded safety and efficacy studies of vaccines and their ingredients, that I am aware of. What is the safe dose of injected aborted fetal tissue? And mercury, by itself and in combo with one or more of the other ingredients? How many unidentified primate viruses are acceptable in vaccines?
Anyone wondering about the agenda-driven science with such organizations as the AAP should consider their position on gun control, and continued quoting of discredited studies on the presence of guns in the home.
“What is that even supposed to mean?”
What it means it that conventional medicine in this country has supported medical and dietary guidelines that have produced a couple of generations of obese, learning-disabled, and chronically sick children. I have traveled extensively, and nowhere else in the world are children as unhealthy as they are here.
“The fact is that what happened with Hannah Poling was a direct result of her mitochondrial abnormality”
I have communicated with the Poling family. Mom is, IIRC (it has been many years), a nurse and attorney, and Dad is an MD. Not your profile of uninformed anti-vaxxers, to be sure. They don’t share your assessment. The vaccine Court ruled that the vaccine did cause the problem. Why else would they have awarded the family millions in lifetime compensation? There was a lump sum award and something like $250k/year in treatment/support.
Right now, something like 1/42 boys in NJ is autistic. I read a statistic recently that the trend is increasing unabated. If we hit 1/10 children will you still be suggesting that it is all God’s fault (creating a “defective child”)?
The political establishment in the Democrat party, and to a lesser degree the Republican party, supports your position on vaccination. Hillary and Bernie support your position. And let’s not forget that many R politicians are scared to express any independence on this issue. Discussion is not allowed. #vaccine_sacred_cow
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