Module 12: Disease

My disease that I picked for the blog post is the mumps. Mumps is caused by a virus. Some of its symptoms includes muscle aches, tiredness, loss of appetite, fever, and swelling of salivary glands. This swelling is what causes puffy cheeks and a sore jaw. It spreads by direct contact with saliva or droplets from a throat, nose, or mouth. So, if someone coughed, sneezed, shared a cup with someone, or participated in other close contact contact activities, they have a high chance of spreading the disease. It is recommended that people who have the mumps should stay home until their symptoms go away and are cleared by a doctor. There are not too many complications that arise with mumps, but occasionally in adults there will be inflammation that occurs in the body that can cause some problems. There is a vaccination for mumps. The vaccination program was started in 1967. It involves 2 doses. Most people get these when they are babies. With the vaccination, there is an 88% reduction in risk for mumps, and a 78% reduction if you just get the one shot.

Due to the fact that there is a vaccine, there are not a lot of people that get the mumps nowadays. However, I was able to find where there was multi-state outbreak in 2006 that had 6,500 reported cases. The people most affected by this outbreak were college-aged students in the Midwest! It makes sense that there would be an outbreak in a college. There are a lot of people participating in a lot of close contact, (dorms, etc). So, the more people there are in a small location, the higher likelihood there is to spread the mumps. One case could quickly turn into many

Below is a picture of someone with the mumps so you can see what it looks like. Additionally, all my information was from the CDC website and the following study.

(https://www.cdc.gov/mumps/index.html)

(https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa0706589)