Massive vaccination program against mumps epidemic under way in Moldova

Moldova is facing a massive mumps epidemic, with the number of reported cases increasing more than 10-fold in the past year, health officials said Tuesday.

About 80 percent of the 20,000 cases recorded by doctors this year have been aged 15-24, but the real number may be higher, said Ion Bahnarel, director of the National Center for Preventive Medicine.

Last year, there were just 1,700 cases of mumps in Moldova.

Heath officials blamed the current epidemic on poor-quality vaccines given decades earlier.

"Most of them were vaccinated at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s," said Anatol Melnic of the National Center for Preventive Medicine. "Until 1992, we worked with vaccines made in Russia."

Melnic said that, at the time, health officials worked with multiple use syringes which were boiled to sterilize, and sometimes were still hot when used, rendering the vaccine less effective.

A former health minister accused the current government of failing to vaccinate young people who had received the less-effective earlier vaccinations.

"The epidemic could have been avoided, or at least the effects lessened, if authorities had begun to revaccinate in November and December when the number of mumps cases was higher than the norm," former Health Minister Mihai Magdei said.

Authorities have launched a nationwide program to vaccinate all Moldovans aged 14 to 24, and so far have treated 75,000 young people out of a planned 570,000.

Moldova saw its last mumps epidemic between 1996 and 1998, when about 11,000 people were recorded with the disease. Severe cases of mumps could lead to meningitis, sterility and other health problems.