IT’S NEVER TOO LATE FOR MMR JAB

MEASLES, mumps and rubella are not the benign childhood diseases some imagine.

The first patient I admitted to intensive care at Westminster Hospital when I was training in 1973 was a man my age with mumps encephalitis, a complication of the illness where the virus infects the brain. He died.

Now it has been reported that the number of children in England being immunised against these diseases (using the combined MMR vaccine) has fallen for the fourth year. At the same time, outbreaks of measles are being reported — another serious disease that can lead to pneumonia and encephalitis.

I cannot stress enough how important it is that children have the MMR vaccine.

In theory the protection is lifelong, but we do occasionally see these illnesses (in milder forms) in vaccinated children — and in those who were not given the MMR as children, or when the injections were given as three single shots and one was forgotten or omitted.

In the case of mumps, this became an issue when the single mumps immunisation was no longer produced (this happened in 2009), leaving children at risk, as I recently witnessed when a young man came to see me after he had contracted acute orchitis.

This is a painful infection of one testicle — his case was so severe that he had been admitted to hospital, where he was screened for sexually transmitted infections.

The illness resolved but the cause remained unidentified until, by taking a detailed history, I discovered one of his friends had had mumps just before he was struck down. A blood test confirmed that he, too, had had the infection. The worry is if both testicles are affected, it causes sterility.

This young man hadn’t had the mumps vaccine. My advice: if you’re in your early 20s or younger and missed out, it’s not too late to have the MMR. Speak to your GP.