This article appeared in ABC 4 News. Read the full story here.
How are students and employees at the College of Charleston, many vaccinated, still getting the mumps?
That’s the question ABC News 4 posed to the U.S. Surgeon General, who was in town talking to the members of the local medical and business community.
Dr. Jerome Adams says he is a big proponent of vaccinations, and has dealt with college mumps cases as a state health commissioner in Indiana.
Dr. Adams says vaccines are not to blame. In fact, he said the outbreak at College of Charleston could be much worse, and experts at MUSC agree.
“It will only stop when we have 25 days straight without a mumps case, so we may keep going with a smattering of cases when Christmas break is over until summer,” says MUSC Infectious Diseases Specialist Dr. Scott Curry.
Dr. Curry says there may be up to 300 cases, but says that’s a small number compared to what it could have been.
“Just remember what this outbreak would look like if we didn’t have kids getting two doses of MMR. It would be every College of Charleston student. Everyone would have had mumps by now. All 12,000 would have a swollen neck,” Dr. Curry says.
Dr. Adams says the best recommendation for anyone at risk of contracting the mumps is another round of the MMR vaccine.
“Vaccines, they are the greatest public health advancement in the U.S. over the last fifty years. It’s just a shock to me that we are going backwards, and that peoples’ lives are being put at risk,” says Dr. Adams says.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the MMR vaccine is approximately 89% effective, even in highly vaccinated populations like the College of Charleston. “Vaccines are safe, they are effective, they are the best protection we have against vaccine-preventable disease, even in an outbreak,” Dr. Adams says.
College of Charleston says it’s still working with DHEC to find what they call patient zero.
The College’s last vaccine clinic in November was targeted at members of fraternities and sororities, groups identified as high-risk populations.