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History

According to Chinese medical literature, mumps was recorded as far back as 640 B.C. The Greek physician Hippocrates documented an outbreak on the island of Thasos in approximately 410 B.C. and provided a fuller description of the disease in the first book of Epidemics in the Corpus Hippocraticum. In modern times, the disease was first described scientifically in 1790 by British physician Robert Hamilton in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. During the First World War, mumps was one of the most debilitating diseases among soldiers. In 1934, the etiology of the disease, the mumps virus, was discovered by Claude D. Johnson and Ernest William Goodpasture. They found that rhesus macaques exposed to saliva taken from humans in the early stages of the disease developed mumps. Furthermore, they showed that mumps could then be transferred to children via filtered and sterilized, bacteria-less preparations of macerated monkey parotid tissue, showing that it was a viral disease.

In 1945, the mumps virus was isolated for the first time. Just a few years later, in 1948, an inactivated vaccine using killed viruses was invented. This vaccine provided only short-term immunity and was later discontinued. It was replaced in the 1970s with vaccines that have live but weakened viruses, which are more effective at providing long-term immunity than the inactivated vaccine. The first of these vaccines was Mumpsvax, licensed on 30 March 1967, which used the Jeryl Lynn strain. Maurice Hilleman created this vaccine using the strain taken from his five-year-old daughter, Jeryl Lynn. Mumpsvax was recommended for use in 1977, and the Jeryl Lynn strain continues to be used.

Hilleman worked to combine the attenuated mumps vaccines with measles and rubella vaccines, creating the MMR-1 vaccine. In 1971, a newer version, MMR-2, was approved for use by the US Food and Drug Administration. In the 1980s, the benefit of multiple doses was recognized, so a two-dose immunization schedule was widely adopted. With MMR-2, four other MMR vaccines have been created since the 1960s: Triviraten, Morupar, Priorix, and Trimovax. Since the mid-2000s, two MMRV vaccines have been in use: Priorix-Tetra and ProQuad.

The United States began to vaccinate against mumps in the 1960s, with other countries following suit. From 1977 to 1985, 290 cases per 100,000 people were diagnosed each year worldwide. Although few countries recorded mumps cases after they began vaccination, those that did reported dramatic declines. From 1968 to 1982, cases declined by 97% in the U.S., in Finland cases were reduced to less than one per 100,000 people per year, and a decline from 160 cases per 100,000 to 17 per 100,000 per year in England was observed from 1989 to 1995. By 2001, there had been a 99.9% reduction in the number of cases in the U.S. and similar near-elimination in other vaccinating countries.

In Japan in 1993, concerns over the rates of aseptic meningitis following MMR vaccination with the Urabe strain prompted the removal of MMR vaccines from the national immunization program, resulting in a dramatic increase in the number of cases. Japan provides voluntary mumps vaccination separately from measles and rubella. Starting in the mid-1990s, controversies surrounding the MMR vaccine emerged. One paper connected the MMR vaccine to Crohn's disease in 1995, and another in 1998 connected it to autism spectrum disorders and inflammatory bowel disease. These papers are now considered to be fraudulent and incorrect, and no association between the MMR vaccine and the aforementioned conditions has been identified. Despite this, their publication led to a significant decline in vaccination rates, ultimately causing measles, mumps, and rubella to reemerge in places with lowered vaccination rates.

Outbreaks in the 21st century include more than 300,000 cases in China in 2013 and more than 56,000 cases in England and Wales in 2004–2005. In the latter outbreak, most cases were reported in 15–24 year olds who were attending colleges and universities. This age group was thought to be vulnerable to infection because of the MMR vaccine controversies when they should have been vaccinated or MMR vaccine shortages that had also occurred at that time. Similar outbreaks in densely crowded environments have frequently occurred in many other countries, including the U.S., the Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium.