COOPER CITY, Fla. – Officials at a Broward County middle school informed parents that a student at the school has contracted mumps.
Parents received a letter Friday from the administration at Pioneer Middle School in Cooper City.
The letter did not name the child or include which grade the student is in, but warned parents to watch for symptoms of the disease.
In a comment to a social media, a person claimed to be the parent of the child who was confirmed to have mumps, but insisted another child at the school also had the disease but had not been vaccinated. The person who posted said their child, a boy, had been vaccinated.
However, there has been no confirmation that two students had come down with the highly contagious disease.
Mumps can be transmitted from person-to-person through saliva or respiratory droplets via coughing and sneezing.
Symptoms of mumps include fever, swelling and tenderness or pain in the area of the neck, loss of appetite, vague feeling of weakness, headache, fever, an earache that is aggravated by chewing, swelling in the parotid gland (under the jaw) and pain when chewing or when drinking sour ar acidic liquids.
Pioneer Middle School announced any student presenting those symptoms would be excluded from school.
Through July of this year, 100 mumps cases had been reported in 15 Florida counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward.
In July alone, 36 cases of mumps had been reported. According to the Florida Department of Health, 92 percent of those who came down with mumps were not up-to-date on their vaccines or their vaccination status was unknown.