Oregon State Public Health Division announced today that of the more than 50 Oregon mumps patients diagnosed since May, only one patient actually had contracted the disease.
The others came down with what is now thought to be less serious viruses that show the same outward symptoms, especially a swelling of the salivary glands under the jaw, according to additional testing conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We can no longer call it confirmed mumps,” said Paul Cieslak, M.D., manager of the Communicable Disease Program for the Oregon State Public Health Division. “We had thought we had been dealing with mumps up until this point, but now we’re just not at all sure that it’s mumps.”
Health officials are still advising patients who show symptoms similar to the mumps to follow the same recommendations as before, which include contacting their local health care provider and resting and isolating themselves for nine days.
Cieslak said what patients had been contracting is less serious than mumps, because mumps can become a wide-spread epidemic.
“(The mumps) comes in epidemics,” he said. “The rest of them just tend to be a dot out of the blue.”
Cieslak said the new findings are also important because it shows there is not wide-spread mumps vaccine failure.
“When we hear that we may have a lot of mumps cases, questions start coming up, that is, ‘Is the vaccine working?’”
Besty Meredith of Lane County Public Health agreed.
“That means our immunizations … are still on target,” she said at a press conference Friday afternoon.
Meredith said the situation shouldn’t be classified as a misdiagnosis.
“They did the testing that was indicated, but the testing that was done later was more sophisticated and took a higher standard of care, and it was those later tests that showed the difference,” she said. “In either case we still have the same kind of clinical illness, the same kind of recommendations for treatment and the same recommendations for preventing the spread.”
Cieslak said that in Oregon, doctors were not on the look out for mumps until after an outbreak occurred in Iowa last summer.
“We said ‘Well gee, maybe we’ve got mumps as well (in Oregon). So we started asking doctors to look for it,” he said.
Cieslak said suspected mumps cases should still be reported to public health.
“It just turns out that it hasn’t been very common in Oregon yet,” he said.
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