Mumps Vaccination Campaign for Post Secondary Education Institutions

April 20, 2005 To: Post-secondary Educational Institutions

From: Mary Mincer Hansen, Director-Iowa Dept. of Public Health

As you know, Iowa is experiencing the nation's largest outbreak of mumps in two decades, and the illness has spread to several neighboring states. While most of the over 800 cases in Iowa have been mild, mumps does carry a risk of severe complications and its important this epidemic be halted.

As such, I wanted to provide an update to you as to what our immediate strategy will be to manage this outbreak.

This morning we announced a plan to begin an aggressive vaccination campaign aimed at those Iowans 18 - 22 years old. It is that population that is at highest risk in both getting the mumps, and spreading or transmitted the virus to others. This campaign will initially be targeted at the 35 Iowa counties that have post-secondary educational institutions and seeks to get those who have had no mumps shot or only one shot the recommended two doses. This effort needs to be accomplished quickly as students are concluding their academic year and will be leaving campaign for the summer. Future strategies include reaching out to the high-risk populations in the counties without post-secondary institutions, and will also take into account how much of the high risk population take advantage of this campaign.

The campaign would not be possible without the help of our local public health partner agencies, Iowa's health care community, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Merck Pharmaceutical Company and policy makers. Please contact your local public health department for further information.

This vaccination campaign may not completely stop the outbreak. But we and other health experts across the country feel this is the best strategy we can implement at this time to slow down the transmission and further reduce the risk to Iowans.

We encourage you to go to our web site which has a number of educational and informational documents. www.idph.state.ia.us. Attached please find a summary of our campaign. Thanks for your cooperation.

Mumps Epidemic Prevention and Control Strategy Fact Sheet