Only your neck swelling up - you were lucky. At 21 mumps can have serious implication in regard to fertility.
Like anyone else born in the 60s/70s mumps, chicken pox, measles and German measles were a right of passage you almost looked forward to because you'd get a week to ten days off school. You were actually encouraged to catch them to get it over with and gain immunity, mumps in particular for boys and German measles for girls. The latter can cause birth defects if you get it is as a pregnant adult.
I've never read about a case of reinfection in relation to any those diseases. There probably are cases but if widespread immunity post infection was not a real thing then hundreds of thousands of people who have never been immunised would be being reinfected throughout their lives and they're not.
Although the same chicken pox virus is involved in cases of shingles in adults, something is said to re-trigger the dormant virus, again only a very small percentage of people who've had chicken pox ever suffer from shingles. Post infection immunity is the norm.
I've never had mumps or certainly never had serious symptoms despite both my brother and sister getting it and on least two other occasions as a kid knowingly and deliberately being directly exposed to it. At school I must have been in contact with carriers multiple times too.
Back then the only treatment was a vile over-sweet medicine of some sort and a bottle of Lucuzade which soon went flat ending up even more horrible than it was when new.
But every year some kids died or had serious complications and still do. In the case of measles that could mean blindness, pneumonia and encephalitis. But it was rare, you just accepted there was nothing you could do and endured the the most unpleasant elements of those diseases with a stoicism that has apparently been lost sometime in the last 40 years.
Like anyone else born in the 60s/70s mumps, chicken pox, measles and German measles were a right of passage you almost looked forward to because you'd get a week to ten days off school. You were actually encouraged to catch them to get it over with and gain immunity, mumps in particular for boys and German measles for girls. The latter can cause birth defects if you get it is as a pregnant adult.
I've never read about a case of reinfection in relation to any those diseases. There probably are cases but if widespread immunity post infection was not a real thing then hundreds of thousands of people who have never been immunised would be being reinfected throughout their lives and they're not.
Although the same chicken pox virus is involved in cases of shingles in adults, something is said to re-trigger the dormant virus, again only a very small percentage of people who've had chicken pox ever suffer from shingles. Post infection immunity is the norm.
I've never had mumps or certainly never had serious symptoms despite both my brother and sister getting it and on least two other occasions as a kid knowingly and deliberately being directly exposed to it. At school I must have been in contact with carriers multiple times too.
Back then the only treatment was a vile over-sweet medicine of some sort and a bottle of Lucuzade which soon went flat ending up even more horrible than it was when new.
But every year some kids died or had serious complications and still do. In the case of measles that could mean blindness, pneumonia and encephalitis. But it was rare, you just accepted there was nothing you could do and endured the the most unpleasant elements of those diseases with a stoicism that has apparently been lost sometime in the last 40 years.
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