Ireland reports record numbers of young people getting the mumps this year. Most are students in the 18-24 age group who are reporting inflammation of the salivary glands as the main symptom.

Geez, I thought mumps was a thing of the past. Looked up its history–hard to find on the web–but got this tidbit:

“…some older virology textbooks that still included some historical background information on viruses.

• Hippocrates described an outbreak of mumps in the 5th century B.C.
• Hamilton in 1790 emphasized the importance of orchitis and thought some CNS complications also were related to this glandular infection.
• In 1934 Johnson and Goodpasture demonstrated a filtrable virus was present in the saliva after successfully transmitting the virus to rhesus monkeys…
• Habel in 1945 was able to cultivate the virus in chick embryo …

Wonder if the Irish were preoccupied with something else (like bombing each other?) 15 or 20 years ago and didn’t bother to follow routine with the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (for kids 15 months of age or older). Anyway, if you’re inclined, here’s a site on modern Irish history. Might be fun to know some of that stuff for St. Patrick’s day coming up.