Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of trends in the number of mumps cases in England in each of the last five years.

Public Health England (PHE) has published annual data on the number of laboratory confirmed mumps cases from 1996 to 2019 at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/measles-confirmed-cases/confirmed-cases-of-measles-mumps-and-rubella-in-england-and-wales-2012-to-2013

Provisional PHE data show that there were 5,042 lab-confirmed cases of mumps in England in 2019, compared to 1,066 cases in 2018. This is the highest number of cases since 2009. The rise in cases looks set to continue in 2020, with over 1,000 confirmed cases in January 2020 compared to 191 during the same period in 2019. This can be viewed at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/mumps-outbreaks-across-england

The steep rise in cases in 2019 has been largely driven by outbreaks in universities and colleges. Many of the cases in 2019 were seen in the so-called ‘Wakefield cohorts’ – young adults born in the late nineties and early 2000s who missed out on the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine when they were children. These cohorts are now old enough to attend college and university and are likely to continue fuelling mumps outbreaks into 2020.This can be viewed at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mumps-confirmed-cases/mumps-confirmed-cases-in-england-and-wales-by-age-and-region-2012-to-2013