What Will It Take to Eradicate Mumps?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi. My name is Paul Offit. I'm talking to you today from the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. What I want to talk about is something that's going on in Philadelphia right now, which is a mumps outbreak at Temple University. As of this morning, there have been 99 reported cases of mumps. Mumps have been reported at Drexel University, also in Philadelphia, and at Westchester University, which is just outside the city.

What's going on? Let's start at the beginning.

The mumps vaccine was originally developed in the United States in 1967 by Dr Maurice Hilleman. At the time, about 200,000 cases of mumps were reported, and that was probably a low estimate of what was really going on. Mumps is not a trivial disease. It can affect the parotid glands and cause pain when trying to eat, but it also can affect the testes, causing orchitis, which can lead to sterility. It can affect the ovaries, causing oophoritis, which also can lead to sterility. So it's not a trivial infection.

Because of the mumps vaccine, we went from about 200,000 to about 200 cases a year. But mumps has never been eliminated, and that's different from the measles and rubella components of the MMR vaccine.