single mumps vaccine

[mango2000]

Has anyone else had trouble receiving the single mumps vaccine? We opted for the single jabs of mmr for our daughter when she was 13months old. She is now 3 years old and still waiting for the mumps. By which time we have just been informed she now needs the mmr booster!

LOL at the scaremongering. "rubella is not safe for anyone to get", indeed

Rubella in children is such a mild disease that many parents don't even realize that their kids have had it. Many women are surprised to see, when pregnant, that they are immune to rubella, meaning they must have had it at some point. I'm referring to those of us born at an era when there was no MMR.

DS had it at 4 months. A rash started on his face, then covered his body, and was gone the next day. I only recognized it as rubella because I remembered he had a very slight fever of 37.5 C two days before, and was red behind the ears at the time. Apparently those are signs of rubella. I can't say that he was bothered at any time during his battle with this awful affliction

"LOL at the scaremongering"

Glad I could entertain.

Are you saying that only pregnant women are harmed by rubella?

Or that I could have found a gentler way of putting my point across?

Op, I don't know if you are still around, but you might be interested to know that girls who have mumps are statistically less likely to have ovarian cancer.

I read an article which sought to explain why these were connected and not just a coincidence but I can't remember where or when.

@DBennett,

I think you made your point perfectly well, but I think you and I are lone voices on this thread.

FWIW I was deliberately trying to provoke in my earlier post, but I do get very irritated with the 'It's OK if it's OK for me/my DC' brigade. We do have a responsibility towards society as a whole, not just to ourselves and our families.

Trouble is society doesn't always feel the same responsibility when things go wrong with vaccines. It seems like a one way street.

There is rather a tendency to say oo er not me guv and run very fast in the other direction when people who take the "socially responsible" route end up with an ill or damaged child.

That's not my understanding of the situation.

I know that in the late 70s and early 80s the consensus was that having mumps made you more likely to get ovarian cancer, example paper here.

More recently data is more mixed with some studies coming up with a protective effect, some showing increased risk.

There is a theory which explains this mix, that having mumps makes you more likely to get ovarian cancer but makes your body recognise some types of ovarian cancer as something to be fought.
See here.

As such, mumps vaccines are currently being studies as anti-cancer agents.

Is that what you were referring to?

No, not at all. I was referring to studies that show that if girls have mumps they are less likely to have ovarian cancer.

That's what I'm talking about.

Some studies show that women who have had mumps are less likely to get ovarian cancer.

Some studies show women who have had mumps are more likely to get ovarian cancer.

I gave a (brief) explanation why that might be the case and what is being done about it.

What did you want me to talk about?

I don't want to talk about anything with you {hmm] I was telling the op that a study shows this. Should she not know? Prefer her not too?

Oh, OK.

But my posts (and more importantly the links) are still relevant to the OP.

Arguably more so as you are/were trying to give a one sided view of a complicated issue.

Appletrees - yes you are so right when you say it's a one way street. And imo it's tantamount to bullying. How dare anyone, least of all a lay person (not even a healthcare professional)tell me what drugs I should allow someone else to put into my child
Don't really want to get into a pro/anti vax convo (naively thought a single mumps vaccine thread might be safe territory)but it does piss me off mightily that people with a very simplistic attitude towards vaccination think they have a right to impose their views on others. Deciding whether to vaccinate a child is a huge decision for parents and they should be allowed (not judged) to make that choice based on their understanding of research and their own particular circumsances.

Happy to have a dialogue about vaccines.

Or, more interestingly, about how much interest society can take in a individual childs wellbeing.

Both are topics I find interesting.

Society doesn't really take such a great interest in an individual child's well-being. It is the parents of that individual child who take that great interest in his well-being, above and beyond of that of a hypothetical pregnant woman they have never met and her fetus.

To answer your earlier post re rubella - Yes, that was scaremongering. Rubella is a very mild disease when had in childhood. It is so mild that a lot of people don't even know that they have had it. It causes a one-day fever of about 37.5 C, which parents might not even notice. The rash comes and goes in a day.

Now, you will surely point to some poor child who had rubella complications, but such things are extremely rare. The only real danger from rubella is to the fetus of non-immune pregnant women. If a pregnant woman is not immune and is scared of catching rubella, she should stay at home for the duration of her pregnancy. It is unreasonable to expect the whole world to vaccinate their girls and boys so that she can continue to be irresponsible about her own health and that of her baby without any consequences.

Putting aside the surprise many in the health, social care or teaching fields may feel to hear how society doesn't care individual children, I'm interested how you talk about the risks.

I don't argue that rubella complications in non-pregnant individuals is rare.
I think I said 1 in 6000 for encephalitis and 1 in 3000 for thrombocytopenia.

Those are real risks.
On average that's the chance of an individual dying in a car accident this yr.

Yes, the main reason that rubella is a childhood vaccination rather than a pre-pregnancy one is that it doesn't work that way.
Before the vaccine was done in childhood some 150 pregnancies were lost due to Rubella.

But adding Rubella to the Mumps & Measles vaccine has almost negligible risk.

That's a a pretty good risk/benefit trade off.

Cotedazure. Rubella is not easily caught in childhood. It comes in epidemics every 5 to 7 years, it does not occur all the time.

I actually caught rubella from my mother when I was 13 and she was 38. A work colleague caught it at a similar age, she was the same age as my mother and I suspect it was the same epidemic. In the last big epidemic in the early 60s in the US 10s of thousands of babies were either miscarried or were damaged.

"Between 1963 and 1965 a rubella (German measles) epidemic swept the nation. It caused thirty thousand miscarriages; another twenty thousand pregnant women who contracted the disease gave birth to babies who suffered severe deformities, including blindness, deafness, limb defects, heart defects, and mental retardation. Infection in the first half of pregnancy meant a 50 percent chance that the baby would be affected. Later infections, in the second half of pregnancy, were less devastating (only 20 percent of babies were affected."

This was not something that is easily caught and you get over with in childhood.

If babies were not vaccinated against rubella en masse, they would very probably have it in childhood. It is, let's remember, a childhood disease. Or, it used to be.

Rubella is only really dangerous to fetuses of non-immune pregnant women. Therefore, it makes sense to test for rubella immunity in teenagers and vaccinate then if necessary.

It is totally, completely, and utterly unreasonable to expect parents to vaccinate their babies, especially baby boys, against a mild childhood disease to protect a hypothetical baby of a non-immune pregnant girl he might never even meet in his life, let alone during her pregnancy.

There have been cases of rubella in DD's preschool each of the three years that she has been there. DS had it last year. You seem to be suggesting that rubella only appears once every seven years or som which is demonstrably false.

DBennett - Your argument re rubella "risks" is not convincing because:

1. MMR vaccine also causes encephalitis and thrombocytopenia
2. Risk/benefit analysis is different for each player in a game, including the decision to vaccinate.

For the government, vaccination makes sense for many reasons.

For the individual families, it makes sense if and only if the perceived risk of the vaccine is much smaller than the perceived risk of the actual disease for their child. Not for faceless strangers and their fetuses.

Unfortunately for the state, the decision power for or against the vaccine is in the hands of the parents.

Risk of rubella for my baby : Known and so close to zero as to be effectively zero.
Risk of MMR to my baby : Unknown and potentially irreversibly damaging.

"If babies were not vaccinated against rubella en masse, they would very probably have it in childhood"

The best evidence we have is that this is not the case.
Take this for example, less than 50% had Rubella antibodies.

"Therefore, it makes sense to test for rubella immunity in teenagers and vaccinate then if necessary."

As I said before, this is what we used to do.
And, as I said before, it didn't work.

One sample of children in Spain does not talk for the entire world. I know that where I come from (Turkey) MMR is a rather recent phenomenon and women of childbearing age are still pretty much all immune to rubella.

From the same source that you linked to, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15138523 is a study that says so.

If testing teenagers & vaccinating where necessary didn't work in the UK, perhaps it wasn't done properly. I cannot think of a reason why it wouldn't, except, possibly that some girls have babies before they were due for vaccination or that immigrants were not vaccinated in time.

Or, of course, that vaccination is not 100% effective and its immunity wears off in time. Just another reason why we should let mild diseases run their courses where possible.

Corteazur can you please read threads properly.
The epidemic in the US lasted from 1963 to 1965 so yes it can be caught 3 consecutive years.

If it is so easily caught in childhood why were 50,000 unborn babies effected in such a short period.

27% aren't in that study.
18& aren't in this study.
23% in this study.
33% in this study.

The consensus of these studies is that vaccination efforts should be increased, in line with WHO guidance.

Rubella vaccination is very safe and very cheap.
I find it hard to understand anyone not wanting it done worldwide.

Bruffin - For clarity, are you claiming that rubella can only be had for a few years and then disappears for 7 years or so?

DB - We can continue to find studies that contradict each other, which will show, possibly, that 6 year olds have lower immunity prevalence than women. Or that one place has higher rubella rates than another.

Anyway, the fact remains that rubella is a very mild disease for which vaccinating babies makes no sense. It is only dangerous to fetuses of non-immune women.

I realize that the state would like me to vaccinate DC for herd immunity, but it does not make sense for my babies, so they will not have it. Any non-immune woman wishing to avoid rubella contamination should vaccinate themselves.

End of the story (for me and mine), really.

DB - There is no "rubella vaccination" afaik. What you mean is MMR whose safety is not that certain at all.

Rubella does tend to be added to Measles for MR or Measles and Mumps for MMR.

That's mainly due to coincidental timing and the fact that the largest cost of vaccination is the medical staff time to do it.

And yes, for the record, MMR is very safe.

Not perfectly safe.

But much safer, both for the individual and the community, than going without.