CORRECTION: Three Mumps Cases Confirmed In County
By Paul Swiech, The Pantagraph, Bloomington, Ill.
Apr. 20–The story slugged PP-0420-Three-Mumps-Cases-Confirmed-In-County, moved by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News for Apr. 20, contained an error in the fifth and sixth paragraphs.
People with confirmed cases of mumps in McLean County are two females and one male. The sex of one individual was incorrect in the article.
Please delete the previous version and use the corrected one below.
Three Mumps Cases Confirmed In County
By Paul Swiech
The Pantagraph, Bloomington, Ill.
Apr. 20–BLOOMINGTON — McLean County has three confirmed cases of mumps and more are inevitable, health department director Bob Keller said.
Statewide, the number of confirmed cases has grown to 81 individuals in 26 counties, as the epidemic that began in Iowa continues to expand in Illinois, the Illinois Department of Public Health reported. In an average year, the state has 13 mumps cases.
Keller asked Wednesday that county residents make sure they are vaccinated for the viral infection of the salivary glands, stay away from people who have mumps, and practice good hygiene.
But residents shouldn’t become alarmed, he said. Complications from mumps generally are not acute.
The three county residents with mumps are two females and one male, ages 15 to 40, Keller said. Two are students, said Keller, who declined to give more specifics.
None of the three people with mumps needed to be hospitalized, nor has any of them had major complications so far, Keller said.
Symptoms of mumps include swollen salivary glands, fever, headache and malaise, and generally last about nine days, he said.
Sometimes, complications appear later. They include swelling of ovaries or testicles, and — in rare cases — deafness, meningitis, spontaneous abortion, and sterility in men, he said.
The health department is investigating a fourth suspected case of mumps, he said. Two other suspected cases turned out not to be mumps.
“My suspicion is we’re going to have more,” Keller said. How many more cases is unknown.
“We have high levels of (mumps vaccine) compliance in this community,” he said. “So, it won’t grow like wildfire, but we’ll probably end up with a handful of cases.”
McLean County has averaged zero to four cases of mumps in recent years.
Meanwhile, Woodford County Health Department reported no additional cases beyond the one case announced last Friday.
Other Central Illinois counties with confirmed cases of mumps are Peoria with two, Macon with two and Champaign with one, the state health department said.
Keller predicted the number of cases will continue to rise. The outbreak began on a college campus, so high school and college students who interact with a lot of people are at high risk.
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