Once we grow up, we leave “childhood” diseases such as measles and chicken pox behind, along with Tinker Toys and hall passes. Right? Wrong. Actress Angelina Jolie had to sit out the premier of her film “Unbroken” after contracting chicken pox. The National Hockey League recently made headlines after members of five teams were diagnosed with the mumps. California officials are battling the worst whooping cough epidemic to hit the state in 70 years. And last May, an Amish community in Ohio became the epicenter of America’s worst measles outbreak in nearly two decades after several unvaccinated individuals brought the disease home from a mission trip to the Philippines.
The good news? If you were exposed to these diseases as a kid, your chances of getting them again are slim. Bad news? If you never suffered from one of these maladies — or were never immunized yourself — you run the risk of infection, particularly as childhood vaccination rates decline in some communities due to parents’ fears of health complications. Plus, experts say, not all vaccines are created equal; some have higher success rates than others, and occasionally people need booster shots to ensure lasting protection.
So how do these childhood diseases affect adults? It varies from person to person, but generally the older you are, the harder you’re hit. “If you’re older, you’re likely to get a more severe case of the disease with a greater likelihood of complications,” says William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
Here’s what you need to know about some of the most common childhood diseases making a comeback:
Mumps
Do you have a headache? Feeling feverish and weak? Are your salivary glands, right in front of your ears, painful and swollen? These are telltale signs that you might have the mumps.
The mumps virus is transmitted via the respiratory route — meaning it can invade you when drops of saliva or mucus from an infected person are torpedoed your way through coughs and sneezes, casual conversation or breathing. It can also spread by sharing utensils or cups. The average incubation period is 16 to 18 days; people with mumps are considered most infectious about five days after parotitis — doctor-speak for inflammation of the parotid glands, salivary glands on either side of the face.
Infants typically receive two doses of the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella, during routine childhood immunization. This means mumps –once so common that more than 150,000 cases were reported each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — has been mostly eliminated in the United States, Schaffner says. Each year, only a few hundred people are reported to have the disease.
So how, exactly, did more than a dozen professional hockey players get mumps in 2014?
First of all, the mumps vaccine is only 88 percent effective at preventing the disease, Schaffner says. Secondly, the vaccine “is very effective in the short term but over time, your protection can [fade],” he says. “Fifteen to 20 years after vaccination, about 10 to 15 percent of individuals — in some circumstances, 20 percent — can have waning immunity. You could once again become partially susceptible to mumps.”
Plus, Schaffner points out, the close quarters hockey players typically share both on and off the ice is a recipe for contagion. (Most mumps outbreaks occur in crowded spaces — say, a college dorm or bar.)
One particularly unpleasant complication among men with mumps, Schaffner says, is inflamed testicles. “There is a lot of folklore that mumps in males can leave you sterile because of the inflammation and infection,” he says. “That’s fortunately pretty unusual — but it is a very uncomfortable infection for a while.”
Similarly, women’s ovaries can become inflamed, a phenomenon that’s harder to diagnose but can result in abdominal pain. In rare instances, mumps can cause encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain. It can also rob children of their hearing.
If you do get the infection as an adult, Schaffner says, you usually develop what he calls “modified mumps” — a less-extreme version. “It’s not as severe as a full-blown case,” he concludes. “But nonetheless, it’s mumps.” His advice for avoiding the disease? Consider getting a booster vaccine and steer clear of anyone actively infected with mumps.
Chickenpox
If you had chickenpox as a kid, you were probably itchy, miserable and bedridden for five to 10 days. Silver lining? You gained immunity against a disease that, unlike a fine wine, gets even more unpleasant with age, says Jeffrey Donowitz, a pediatric infectious disease fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“Adults get a much [worse case of the chickenpox], with more severe systemic symptoms,” Donowitz says. “They can really get sick and need hospitalization and supportive care, versus kids, who usually just feel crummy for a couple days.”
Because of the chickenpox vaccine, introduced in the early 1990s, very few children nowadays get the disease, along with the fever, tiredness and upraised red rash that go with it. However, adults who didn’t get chickenpox as children should consider getting the vaccine — a shot that works in 90 percent of all individuals who haven’t yet been vaccinated.
If you do come down with chickenpox as an adult, you have a higher risk of pneumonia, brain inflammation and autoimmune hepatitis, when the body’s own immune system attacks the liver.
Even those infected as children aren’t entirely out of the woods: The chicken pox virus can lie dormant in your body for years, causing complications in adulthood. Like shingles — a painful outbreak of blisters. Unfortunately, there is little remedy for shingles, which typically runs its course in a little over a week. The wait can be blunted by antiviral prescription medications, pain medications and calamine or oatmeal baths. Doctors do, however, encourage those with shingles to consider antiviral treatment designed to prevent long-term nerve pain the virus can trigger.
Measles
First you notice a burning fever, accompanied by a cough, runny nose and red, watery eyes. Two or three days later, the inside of your mouth is speckled with little white spots. Not long after that, a telltale red rash sweeps across your entire body. With only 610 cases reported nationwide this past year, you wonder, “How on earth do I have measles?”
According to Greg Wallace, head of the CDC’s Measles, Mumps, Rubella and Polio team, measles is rare in this country. When an outbreak occurs, it’s because someone who wasn’t vaccinated traveled to another country, developed the disease, brought it home and infected others who hadn’t been immunized.
The symptoms of measles are the same, regardless of age, Wallace says. However, certain people are at higher risk for complications — namely the very young or old, or those with weakened immune systems. Pneumonia, for example, is one complication that can hit infants and elderly patients with measles particularly hard, even requiring hospitalization. And measles can be dangerous for pregnant women.
If you were born before 1957, breathe a sigh of relief — you were likely exposed to a prior measles epidemic, Wallace says, and are thereby protected. Those born in later decades who received the two-dose MMR shot are also unlikely to get measles, as the vaccine is 97 percent effective, Wallace adds.
However, he says, health officials didn’t begin recommending the two-dose MMR shot until the early 1990s. If you were a child during this time, you may have received only one dose — meaning you might need an additional shot, especially if you’re a young health care worker, college student or traveler.
Whooping Cough
“The story I’m going to tell you is once again the same,” Schaffner says. “We vaccinate children against pertussis, otherwise known as whooping cough. The vaccine we currently use, [introduced in the 1990s], provides protection that’s wonderful in the short term. But after about five years, the protection begins to wane.”
That means there’s an increasing population of young adults, ranging from high school students to college-age individuals, who only have partial protection against whooping cough. We’re seeing more outbreaks as a result — particularly among the nation’s youth.
Whooping cough is a bacterial infection characterized by prolonged coughing fits interrupted by gasps that make a “whooping” sound. These coughing fits — which can last a month or more — are sometimes so severe that patients fracture their ribs or faint.
In 2012, there were 48,277 cases of whooping cough reported in the United States, although this number is likely higher due to undiagnosed and unreported cases. But Schaffner says the populations at greatest risk for experiencing whooping-cough complications are infants and adults, particularly infants, who, upon infection, must often be hospitalized. Because of waning immunity among U.S. adults, more infants today are vulnerable. To counteract this trend, the CDC now recommends that teens and adults get the booster shot, TDaP, every 10 years, which protects against diptheria, tetanus and whooping cough (immunity fades after a decade). Women are also advised to get the vaccine with every pregnancy.
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How to Deal With Childhood Diseases as an Adult originally appeared on usnews.com
