Health officials have now confirmed 16 mumps cases at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., according to The Crimson.
The university's first mumps case was confirmed three weeks ago. In that time, the virus has since spread to other Boston-area campuses — Tufts has confirmed two cases and Boston University confirmed three. According to state officials, there have been 30 mumps cases in Massachusetts since Jan. 1. Harvard has been working to isolate its infected students.
Anita M. Barry, MD, the director of the Infectious Disease Bureau in the Boston Public Health Commission, expressed that the transmission of the virus has been relatively difficult to track. "When you start to interview cases and you try to get them to backtrack 25 days from when they first noticed the onset of swelling in their face... it's hard to do...for the most part, we have not been able to identify one-on-one spread," Dr. Barry said in The Crimson.
In regards to vaccination concerns, Dr. Barry said in The Crimson, "The schools in Boston, and frankly most of the colleges, universities, and other schools in our area are very good about making sure that people who require those immunizations have had them...the most likely explanation is that there were some people in whom the vaccine did not induce a protective response as we would have liked."
The mumps resurgence this year has not been limited to Boston-area campuses. Cases have been confirmed at University of North Carolina in Charlotte, SUNY Buffalo in New York, University of Kentucky in Lexington and at the campuses of three universities in Indiana.
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