Mumps Cases Found In Southern Wisconsin

Mumps has appeared in La Crosse County for the first time in years, with one confirmed case and three suspect cases on the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse campus. The virus is showing up in concentrated areas across southern Wisconsin.

The virus has infected UW-La Crosse students living on and off-campus.

Mumps starts out with a low-grade fever and achiness and leads to a swollen cheek or jaw. It can lead to more severe complications in adults, such as swollen testicles and ovaries, and meningitis.

La Crosse County public health nurse Christine Gillespie says mumps spreads through coughing, sneezing, kissing, or sharing food and drinks.

“You know, it’s interesting with the timing of these cases,” she said. “Spring break was a couple weeks ago. With the incubation period of mumps, most of the cases we’re seeing now were probably exposed during spring break.”

Gillespie says the best protection against mumps is to get the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, although it’s only 80-90 percent effective in preventing the virus. She says each of the UW-La Crosse students impacted were immunized.

Dan Hopfensperger is the state Department of Health Services’ director of the Wisconsin Immunization Program. He says in addition to the La Crosse mumps case, there are seven in the Madison area, and two in southeast Wisconsin. Hopfensberger says the concentration of mumps is rare.

“Anything where we get a concentration of cases like we are now, we would call an outbreak, just because we want to call attention to it, we want to deal with it, we want to make sure clinicians are aware of it,” he said.

Mumps is showing up elsewhere in the country. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the most extreme outbreak was found among students at Ohio State University and has led to 230 mumps cases in two Ohio counties.