by Claudia Boyd-Barrett posted in Parenting

A new study has good news and bad news about the mumps portion of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.
The good news: It's highly unlikely your child will get mumps early in life if he receives the two recommended MMR vaccine doses (One between 12 and 15 months, and another between 4 and 6 years old).
The bad news: Once your child hits his late teens or twenties, he may become susceptible to getting the virus again.
Harvard scientists analyzed 6 studies on the effectiveness of the mumps vaccine. Then they used computer models to decipher whether various mumps outbreaks among teens and on college campuses since the late 1980's might be linked to waning immunity in young people who got the vaccine as kids.
Surprise! They were right. The vaccine typically works well during the first couple of decades after kids get the vaccine, the scientists found. But on average, people lose their immunity after about 27 years (although it can happen as early as age 16), according to the findings published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Thankfully, there don't appear to be new strains of the mumps virus that the current vaccine can't protect against ? that would be a problem because then scientists would have to create an entirely new vaccine. It also means that teens and college-age kids are more at risk of getting sick from the mumps than younger children who've been vaccinated.
For protection in later years, the researcher...