A mumps outbreak in the Marshall Islands may be hitting the country much harder than reported, according to the country's Ministry of Health.
Since the viral disease was first found in the Marshalls in March, there have been more than 1,000 confirmed cases.
The ministry says the number of cases has been dropping in recent weeks, but it's noted this may be due to under-reporting, and officials warn figures could be as high as 3,000.
Our correspondent Giff Johnson told Mackenzie Smith the outbreak has come at a particularly bad time for the Marshalls.
Transcript
Testing for mumps.
Photo: 123
GIFF JOHNSON: This time of the year, June and July, we historically have large numbers of people coming in from the remote islands, from the United States and elsewhere to attend annual church conferences. So there are just many thousands of Marshall Islanders on Majuro in addition to the usual residents offering up another pathway for mumps to spread. So the Ministry says it's getting around to the church groups, trying to talk with people about how to prevent mumps.
MACKENZIE SMITH: In terms of the numbers that are actually showing up, the number of confirmed cases seem to be dropping but the Ministry have basically come out and said this might not be the case, with the true number potentially being underreported. Do we know why exactly this is?
GJ: One reason the actual number of mumps cases may be significantly higher than the 1033 that was reported as of last week is the Ministry thinks that people may be heeding the health officials' advice, which is if you've got any of these symptoms just stay home, don't go to work, don't go to school where you could expose other people and don't even come into the hospital unless you are experiencing a severe problem because mumps is just something for most people it'll happen and then in a week or 10 days it'll be gone. So they feel like a lot of people just are not bothering to show up anymore, even though they believe that there are a lot more cases than have been reported to health officials.
MS: So is this a concern do you think? They've got the vaccine program in place which is being put across the wider region but with the underreporting is that a cause for concern?
GJ: Well of course you would like to know the true extent of an outbreak but if people staying home and not coming into report helps to limit exposure there's nothing wrong with that and my feeling is that it seems like looking at the data from the last three months of this outbreak, like in April and May, the numbers spiked very high and there was one week where they had 140 cases, so the fact that it's dropped to under 40 per week in the last couple of weeks suggests that they are down and I don't know much else that the Ministry of Health can do aside from the vaccines. They've had a lot of vaccines donated, these are MMR, the mumps, measles and rubella shots. Thousands of doses were donated by the US Centres for Disease Control, so they've been using those and they've been pretty active with their immunisation campaign. So part of the challenge too, according to one of the doctors that I talked to that is managing the outbreak, is they say that just having the MMR, the mumps vaccine, doesn't necessarily prevent you from getting mumps but it generally prevents it from being a serious case and this is why they think they've actually got reasonably good coverage on immunisations, because a very small number of the mumps cases that have been presented, a very small number have been ones that have serious secondary effects and they're pretty happy about that because that suggest to them that they have immunisation coverage, at least for the children.
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