MAPPING MUMPSThe 2006 outbreak of mumps in the United States hit eight Midwestern states the hardest, as indicated by the darkest shading.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

When you were just a baby, chances are you received a shot to protect you from a disease called mumps. It's a funny name, but the disease is no fun at all. It causes headache, fever, fatigue and swollen salivary glands. Those swollen glands create bumps on the face near the mouth — and "mumps" is an old-fashioned term for those lumps.

Mumps is contagious, meaning it can pass from person to person. To prevent its spread, health officials try to keep people from catching it in the first place.

For that reason, nearly everybody in the United States gets a vaccine against the mumps virus. A vaccine is a substance that prevents people from getting diseases caused by specific viruses or bacteria. Vaccines work by increasing a person's immunity, or ability to resist disease. The mumps vaccine is part of a combined vaccine called an MMR shot, which also prevents measles and another disease called rubella.

Despite widespread vaccinations, mumps broke out among college students in the central U.S. in 2006. In all, 6,584 people caught the disease that year.

Surprisingly, most of these people did receive the mumps vaccine as babies. So why did they still get sick?

Health researchers don't have an answer yet, but they suspect protection from the vaccine might have worn off, or the vaccine may need to be updated. The vaccine used today was developed in the 1960s, so the vaccine might need to be improved, says William Bellini, a molecular biologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. He says "boosting" the vaccine with extra ingredients that activate the immune system could help.

Even though some vaccinated people still got sick, their symptoms probably were not as severe as they would have been without the vaccine, says epidemiologist Jane Seward of the CDC. Plus, the number of people who caught mumps was much lower than it was during outbreaks in the 1950s and 1960s, before the vaccine existed. That tells researchers that even though some people caught mumps, the vaccine did keep the disease from spreading out of control.

The outbreak calls attention to a related problem: fear of vaccination. Some parents do not have their children vaccinated because they are worried about harmful side effects. But side effects of vaccines are rare, say health officials. On the other hand, mumps can lead to brain inflammation, deafness and other serious complications. And kids are especially vulnerable during an outbreak, says William Meller. He's a medical doctor who also teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "There is really huge risk to not immunizing."

Kids today usually get one MMR shot as babies and another before starting grade school. Would a third dose of the vaccine help increase immunity? Scientists don't yet know.

But Bellini says if another outbreak occurs, young people should receive a third dose to see if it keeps the disease in check.

Health officials still don't know what caused the 2006 outbreak. Many of the early cases appeared at Iowa State University in Ames. A few weeks later, students at the University of Kansas in Lawrence came down with the disease as well. Just as the common cold or flu might spread from your classroom to students in another classroom, it looks like students in Iowa transferred the disease to students they knew in Kansas. So to protect student safety, college officials isolated mumps patients to limit the spread.

Fortunately, mumps has since died down here in the U.S. But Canada still has outbreaks, and in recent years, so did Austria and parts of Europe.

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