So it turns out that this whole mumps scare going on in Oregon isn’t actually mumps after all.
The Oregon Department of Human Services announced last week that after additional testing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered that what was previously deemed the mumps is actually something different that produces similar symptoms.
The different bug that 58 Oregonians – including nine University students and 38 people total in Lane County – have
been catching is probably better for public health though, said Betsy Meredith, communicable disease and family planning nursing supervisor for Lane County Public Health.
“We know mumps is really infectious and spreads quite quickly and quite easily, and we know it’s a vaccine preventable disease,” she said at a press conference Friday afternoon. “The fact that we had seen it in people who had been vaccinated was causing some public health concern. But now we can say ‘Well okay that’s because the vaccine is protecting against mumps and this may not be mumps.’”
She said the mumps vaccine is still doing its job and thwarting the mumps virus effectively. Only one person in Oregon this
year has actually contracted the disease.
“We can no longer call it confirmed mumps,” said Dr. Paul Cieslak, 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.”
For now, 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, resting and isolating themselves for nine days.
But local health care providers are now left with the task of informing the patients who they told were infected with the mumps that, well, maybe they were incorrect.
This includes the University Health Center, which confirmed nine cases of the mumps in University students.
“We’ll try and get in touch with them at home,” Tom Ryan, director of the health center said Monday.
At this point, Ryan said, notifying them is a moot point because it doesn’t have impact on how they were treated.
Meanwhile, Oregon State Public Health is unsure what exactly the new bug is that’s making people sick.
“The CDC is as puzzled as the State Health Department in terms of what exactly is causing this,” Ryan said.
Dr. Paul Lewis, a physician with Oregon State Public Health, said they don’t think it’s a new strain of the mumps.
“At this point we all agree that whatever was detected in the Oregon mumps cultures is not mumps. It may be another virus or it could be the result of problems with the lab supplies. It may be some time before we can figure this out,” he wrote in an e-mail.
Lewis said Oregon State Public Health is also unsure about what caused the misdiagnosis.
“Viral culture, the technique in question here, is quite tricky. It is so technically difficult that only three labs in the entire state offer the test, others accept specimens but send them on,” he said.
He said new, more straightforward tests are now being used, and it was the discrepancy between the old and newer tests that raised eyebrows at the CDC and led it to evaluate the cultures.
Lewis said as soon as Oregon State Public Health learned of the mistake it notified patients and clinicians.
“We are always checking our work and resolve any inconsistencies we encounter,” he said. “Of course we wish the results were all consistent but since they were not, we wanted everyone concerned to know as soon as possible.”
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