Officials could not say if the students who contracted the illness were vaccinated, due to medical privacy laws. A vaccination dramatically decreases the chance of someone catching mumps, officials said.
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“If you do not have a vaccination, we really encourage you to get that,” said Dan Suffoletto, spokesman for Public Health of Dayton and Montgomery County. “It’s not just your health that we’re concerned about but it’s the population as a whole.”
UD requires students get vaccinated but permits medical, religious and philosophical exemptions.
The number of non-vaccinated students at UD is “just a handful” of the 10,828 enrolled there, said Mary Buchwalder, director of UD’s student health center. She did not know the exact number of students who haven’t been vaccinated.
Students who take advantage of an exemption have to sign a waiver that indicates they may have to leave campus if a large-scale outbreak or more serious illness, such as measles, spreads. In such an event, non-vaccinated students could be forced to take a semester off, depending on the seriousness of the outbreak, Buchwalder said.
“We really discourage it,” Buchwalder said. “We make sure they don’t just sign it and not read it. They have to understand it.”
The latest mumps outbreak at UD comes less than a year after the last one. In April 2016, at least 19 illnesses were linked to a UD mumps outbreak and the number of confirmed cases eventually jumped to 22, Suffoletto said Thursday.
The latest UD outbreak is part of a growing national trend, officials said. The level of mumps cases may be on the rise this year and officials said outbreaks on college campuses are not uncommon, given UD’s two and another that occurred in 2014 at Ohio State University.
“There have been outbreaks and peaks nationally,” Buchwalder said. “The CDC reports several hundred cases this month already so perhaps everywhere we’ll be seeing more mumps this year.”
Despite the three recent diagnoses, it’s not inevitable the disease will spread, officials said.
RELATED: Mumps reported at the University of Dayton in April 2016
To prevent infection, students are encouraged to wash their hands frequently and avoid sharing cups and utensils, health officials said. UD students may be excused from class by the provost’s office after they have been evaluated and receive a note from the student health center, according to an advisory posted Thursday.
People with mumps tend to get a fever and patients “generally recover uneventfully from it,” Buchwalder said.
“Many of the outbreaks in the last few decades have been on college campuses because students live in close community settings and share things and diseases are part of that,” Buchwalder said.
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About mumps
Mumps can be spread through saliva or mucus from the mouth, nose or throat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those who are infected can spread the virus through coughing, sneezing, touching infected objects and sharing dining utensils.
Persons showing the symptoms of mumps should be seen by a medical doctor, according to the CDC.
CDC reports the most common symptoms of mumps can appear between 12 to 25 days from infection. Those symptoms include:
Fever
Headache
Muscle aches
Tiredness
Loss of appetite
Swollen and tender salivary glands under the ears on one or both sides
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