By Laura Kusisto, Vinnie Rotondaro and Yaffi Spodek
Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn are heading to immunization clinics around the city after a mumps outbreak—the largest U.S. outbreak in five years—has spread through the community.
Parents are already grappling with concerns about long-term effects of the disease. Mumps is rarely fatal, but it can lead to orchitis, or swelling of the testicles, which in rare cases leads to reduced fertility.
“I am very concerned,” said Toby Freund, a mother of seven in Boro Park, including two boys in their early 20s. “All my kids were vaccinated, but I’m most concerned about my older boys because mumps in adult males could cause problems and complications in fertility.
Orchitis is the most common side effect being reported, in about 35 cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The risk is especially worrisome for the Orthodox Jewish community, where large families are valued.
“My gut feeling right now is to leave it alone,” said Freund, who has decided not to get her children the third shot of the vaccine. “But I am concerned, and it is an issue that’s spreading throughout the community.”
Irish scientist Niall Davis has researched the link between mumps and orchitis as it played out in Europe, where the Brooklyn mumps outbreak is thought to have originated.
According to a 2010 report he co-authored on the topic, the incidence of orchitis in the young men is as high as 40 percent.
“The risk of subfertility”—or impaired fertility—“from mumps orchitis is around 13 percent,” Davis said in an email.
If this holds true in the United States, there could be long-term religious and cultural implications for the affected men.
“If it turns out that these men’s fertility is affected on account of the mumps, it’s going to make it very difficult for them to marry,” said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University. “One of the central commandments—indeed the first—is ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ In the ultra-orthodox community that commandment is taken very, very seriously.”
This is especially true in orthodox Jewish communities, where there is a heavy dependence on matchmaking. “One of the things that the matchmakers will be looking at is, ‘Is it possible that this guy is sterile?’” Sarna said. “Matchmakers look at the health of the parents and all sorts of other factors. This would be a factor as well.”
The mumps virus spread to New York after a young boy was infected at a summer camp in Britain. The disease has spread quickly among men in their late teens and early 20s in the tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community.
The Centers for Disease Control said the disease has remained localized because of the insular nature of the religious Jewish community. The community has been tight-lipped about the outbreak. Local health clinics direct all requests for comment to the New York City Department of Health, and community leaders were also unavailable for comment.
According to a report published Thursday on the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control, mumps has been on the rise worldwide in the last several years, starting in Britain and Australia, where many children were not inoculated against the disease in the early 1980s due to a now-debunked medical hypothesis that the vaccine could lead to autism.
Over three-quarter of those infected in New York have received the recommended two doses of the vaccine, according to a press release by the New York City Department of Health. The vaccine is only 75 percent to 90 percent effective, according to the department. Pediatric clinics in Williamsburg and Crown Heights are offering a third vaccine for free this week.
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