Vaccine Against Mumps

Mumps, like measles, is one of those familiar childhood diseases that have long been minimized. Most of its vic tims are between five and ten, and usu ally they suffer no more than a few days of fever and headache, a swollen jaw and difficulty in swallowing. But those symptoms are increasingly being recognized as signs of a potentially serious medical problem. Virologists in many different laboratories have been working overtime to develop an effective preventive vaccine.

Their concern is understandable. For even in childhood, mumps may occasionally cause complications leading to permanent deafness, impairment of vision, or inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. Such difficulties are more common and are likely to be more severe among adults. Grown men face the added risk that inflammation of the testicles may affect fertility.

Killed-virus vaccines against mumps have been available for several years, and they are useful for adults who are likely to be exposed to infection. But since they give an immunity that lasts only a year or two, they are unsuitable for children, who need a vaccine that confers--as the natural disease usually does--virtually lifetime immunity. The Russians claim to have had just such a live-virus vaccine for years, but it has not been accepted here, and U.S. virologists have continued their search.

By lucky coincidence, that search ended when five-year-old Jeryl Lynn Hilleman came down with mumps. Jeryl Lynn is the daughter of Dr. Maurice R. Hilleman, head of the virology team at Merck Sharp & Dohme Institute for Therapeutic Research, which had been hunting for years for a mumps virus that would grow well in the lab and lose its virulence, while still retaining its power to give immunity. Dr. Hilleman and Dr. Eugene Buynak found that Jeryl Lynn's virus was just what they wanted.

Now made into a vaccine, it has already been given to more than 500 youngsters in the Philadelphia area. The children developed no fever or other mumps symptoms. Since vaccination, at least 100 of them have been exposed to natural mumps infection either at home or in school, and only two have come down with the disease. By contrast, among the unvaccinated children who were studied for comparison, 61 out of 100 got classic mumps.

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