Second Witte Hall resident's diagnosis part of larger outbreak, UHS official says The recent outbreak of mumps at UW-Madison continued Tuesday, when a female undergraduate Witte Hall resident was confirmed to have the virus.
Craig Roberts, an epidemiologist at University Health Services, confirmed the case and said there are a couple more\ probable cases, pending lab results. Additionally, he said UHS continues to see more possible cases every day.
Roberts said the UW-Madison cases are part of an outbreak, which he defined simply as more cases than the background number of cases that regularly occur.
""They aren't normally clustered like this,"" he said. ""We're part of an even larger outbreak.""
But before students get too alarmed, UHS director Kathy Poi said the regional outbreak is nowhere near an epidemic.
""Outbreak and epidemic are two entirely different things,"" she said. ""I think probably what's going on in Iowa is a little closer to that, but even there not necessarily.""
Poi said Iowa's mumps cases began in December and the number of cases is in the hundreds.
Although Poi said students' departure after finals should prevent the type of spreading like Iowa, UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health professor Dr. Dennis Maki said Wisconsin could see cases for up to six months.
""I don't think we're going to have huge numbers of cases, and it's not going to be thousands of cases, but we could have a couple hundred cases in Wisconsin,"" he said.
Roberts also said the outbreak could continue.
""We could be at the very beginning of this,"" he said. ""In England, they had an outbreak of mumps that went on for over the course of a year, and they ended up with 60,000 cases. In the United States currently, the Midwest mumps outbreak is up around 1,200 cases.""
But Poi said a bigger outbreak could be curbed because the vast majority of UW-Madison students have had the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
Additionally, Poi said students with confirmed mumps cases are required to be isolated for nine days from the onset of symptoms. Students are allowed to stay in University dorms, but they must stay away from others and wear a protective mask when outside their room.
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