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Before the advent of a mumps vaccine, parotitis caused by the mumps virus, a paramyxovirus, was an extremely common syndrome, particularly in school-aged children. Now 50 years later, the syndrome is rare except as manifested in recent years by outbreaks in the college-aged population. Two articles describe an unusually high incidence of parotitis that occurred mostly among children in the 2014 to 2015 winter and was not caused by mumps virus infection.
Elbadawi and colleagues identified respiratory viruses in 323 cases of nonmumps parotitis, of which 294 had viral testing of buccal samples using polymerase chain reaction for mumps, adenovirus, influenza, parainfluenza, human herpes, cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr viruses. Among 320 with c…