Mumps 'epidemic' affects students

It is thought many students were not properly vaccinated against mumps

An epidemic of mumps has broken out in South Yorkshire with students at two universities bearing the brunt of the wave of illness.

Doctors at the South Yorkshire Health Protection Unit (HPU) has said 145 cases were reported in Sheffield in the first three months of 2009.

The outbreak started in the city in January and spread to students at Hallam University in February.

By March 75 cases had been reported at Sheffield University.

Dr Rosie McNaught from the HPU said there was no risk to the general population and that the outbreak was "self limiting".

She said: "We had a previous outbreak at the university where about 10% of the students ended up in hospital with complications, we have not seen that this time."

New vaccine

Ms McNaught said the introduction of the MMR vaccine was, in part, responsible for the outbreak in the students aged in their early 20s.

She said: "It's not that people were worried about the MMR vaccine, it's the fact that it was a new vaccine.

"When you look at our figures, the most common age at which people are getting mumps at the moment is 20.

"The 20-year-olds are the ones who were around at exactly the time when we changed over from the measles vaccine to the MMR vaccine."

Ms McNaught said a number of the students had measles vaccines as babies and there was a call-back programme to catch people up, but across the country it was "very patchy".

"A lot of these children had single measles vaccine, but weren't called back for the MMR.

"We've also got a number of these children who've had a single dose of MMR, but haven't had two doses.

"The mumps component of the MMR vaccine is the least effective, it only protects you about 70% of the time if you've had one dose, so you do need two doses to get decent levels of protection," she said.