You’ve probably heard the scary stories or seen the startling pictures of kids with mumps. Did you fall for the propaganda?
Let me get to the point up front:
Mumps is not a scary virus.
This is not medical advice. Talk to your doctor.
What is Mumps?
Mumps is an RNA virus transmitted by infected fluids such as saliva. It’s highly contagious.
Once in the body, the mumps virus gets into the respiratory tract and then spreads to the lymphatic system. It can spread systemically from there. We’ll get into some of the symptoms and potential symptoms in a moment.
Mumps has been around forever. It’s documented back in the time of Hippocrates. Around 1970 they created a vaccine and then eventually lumped it in with the measles and rubella vaccines. Today, it’s often given with the varicella vaccine in one combo vaccine.
Mumps Symptoms
The vast majority of people will never know they had mumps. Since it gets into the respiratory tract first, it starts as a mild upper respiratory infection. This means a mild cough, congestion, runny nose, or something along those lines. Maybe you think it’s allergy season and you have post nasal drip. That could be the extent of the virus for most people.
As a side note, this makes it very difficult to track who has the virus. Most people (thankfully) don’t go to the doctor for mild respiratory viruses. They wouldn’t be tested and nobody would know they had mumps. This means the data they do report will look worse than it is in reality. We saw a similar phenomenon during covid.
One of the tricky parts about mumps is the long incubation period. It can take 7-25 days to show symptoms. That makes it virtually impossible to know where you picked up the virus.
Mumps, like many viruses, has different phases.
Prodromal - non-specific mild symptoms as described above. Many people will stop here and never see any other symptoms
Early acute - The virus spreads systemically into the lymphatic system with the most common symptom being parotitis
Established acute - severe systemic symptoms such as meningitis encephalitis, and orchitis - this is very rare but scary
In the early acute phase, the symptoms are all based on the lymphatic spread. There are a ton of lymph nodes in the neck and face. The virus travels there and the nodes become enlarged. That is the reason for the disfigurement caused by mumps that you’ll often see online. Those are extreme cases. Most people have mildly swollen nodes.
The “established acute” phase is pure propaganda. This is extremely rare. Sure, the symptoms are severe and scary. But it’s not common at all. I personally wouldn’t even factor it into my decision-making. Nonetheless, it exists so we should discuss it.
The most common symptom of this phase is orchitis. This is inflammation of the testicle. It’s usually unilateral (one side) and usually transient. It has the potential to reduce sperm production in the affected testicle, but that is also usually transient. Once the infection clears the testicle is just fine. It should also be noted that men (except Lance Armstrong) have two testicles. So even if one of them is firing blanks, the other can still be throwing darts.
Other causes of infertility are way more prevalent and nobody seems to care about addressing those.
Since mumps affects the lymphatic system, it can pretty much affect any organ system. You can read about the potential issues it can cause online if you want. Just know that most of it is written in a way that makes it seem way scarier than reality.
Oh, and the scary meningitis and encephalitis they talk about? It usually resolves on its own after a week. Far less than 1% of cases are lethal.
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The Vaccine
When it comes to the MMR vaccine, measles is the one they’re scared of. This is the virus you always hear about, it’s the one that is (in theory) most deadly. It spreads incredibly quickly. Mumps (and rubella) are an afterthought.
They’re like the ugly cousin you don’t actually want in your family photos during the holidays, so you have them take the picture and photoshop them in after the fact.
In fact, it’s hard to find solid data on how prevalent mumps is after the vaccine. Many countries simply stopped tracking it. The very limited data we have is not reliable and is based on small sample sizes. If you’re not tracking the data how can you be sure it’s working? You can’t.
In theory, the vaccine works pretty well. The total number of mumps cases does seem to have gone down. But who cares? If there are 100,000 mild cases with no severe side effects, why is that scary?
As we discussed in the last article, this vaccine has other side effects and potential side effects. Plus, it’s a combo vaccine which I am ideologically opposed to for reasons we’ve talked about before.
I’m not sure that we need to drag this out much further. Mumps is not that scary. It seems to me the vaccine was created to make some money for Big Pharma, and then they lumped it in with measles and rubella because otherwise nobody would take it.
The fact that it’s been around since at least 400 B.C. and the human race has survived begs the question: is vaccination necessary? Is the risk of infertility as great as they suggest?
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I’m old enough that I had all the childhood diseases... measles, chicken pox, mumps. I felt horrible for a few days but recovered well. And interestingly, my immune system is amazing as an adult. I still haven’t had covid despite working on the public and refusing the jab, and I don’t remember ever having the flu in my entire life. I don’t take flu shots either. Maybe, just maybe, it’s important to get these less severe diseases as kids to enjoy good health later on. It’s a theory that should be considered, at least.
My brother and I went to the doctor for mumps after our dentist cheerily told my mother that it looked like we had it. (A disease so scary the dentist was chipper after being in our faces.) We got some sweet vacay from school, which in my book, was a positive side effect.