Mumps Hits National Hockey League

If you're old enough, you remember kids sent home from school, cheeks swollen like chipmunks. Mumps is a very contagious disease, and one that most people younger than me have never seen. This is a good thing, since mumps in children can sometimes lead to deafness. In adults, it can swell the testicles, breasts, and the brain. Painfully. Thankfully, mumps was nearly eradicated dropping to just 248 cases in 2004. And then Wakefield happened. Certainly Andrew Wakefield, cannot be held solely responsible for the rise in cases of measles and mumps in the US and UK, but in my opinion he certainly bears some responsibility. In 1998 Wakefield published a paper in the Lancet claiming that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine was linked to autism. His paper was eventually retracted, and Wakefield struck off the rolls of doctors in the UK. The British Medical Journal published a series of pieces by journalist Brian Deer convincingly laying out the case for fraud in Wakefield's part. The study was not only junk science, but probably not even based on real evidence. Despite this, MMR vaccination dropped in the UK and the US. There have been a number of mumps outbreaks over the last several years, some associated with unvaccinated Americans who travelled abroad and brought the disease back to their under-vaccinated community.
Source: Forbes.com Healthcare News - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news