Mumps outbreak ‘shameful’

Written by Nick O'Donoghue Friday, 19 June 2009 00:00

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The Director of the Health Pro­tection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) has described the current outbreak of mumps as a “shameful thing to happen” given the presence of the MMR vaccine.

Speaking at the second Annual Scientific Meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of Ireland, Dr Darina O’Flanagan stressed the need to boost uptake of vaccines to protect against preventable illnesses such as the mumps and measles.

She added that it is essential that the current MMR catch-up campaign in secondary schools is successful to increase herd immunity.

“As you know, we’re now having a huge outbreak of the mumps... it’s a shameful thing to happen when we have an effective vaccine that we’re not managing to get out to the population,” she said.

Dr O’Flanagan warned that without an increase in the uptake of the MMR vaccine, a measles outbreak is also a possibility.

“If we don’t manage to catch those kids [who haven’t been vaccinated] who are now in primary and secondary school and vaccinate those, we can be sure that there’ll be an outbreak of measles,” she told the meeting.

The latest figures from the HPSC on notifiable diseases [for the week ending May 30] show an increase of 11 cases of the measles for the year-to-date compared with 2008.

While there have been more than 3,000 cases of the mumps notified so far this year, 2,755 more than the same period last year, Dr O’Flanagan said there had been a decline in the numbers of confirmed cases in recent months.

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