Difficulties in assessing the relationship, if any, between mumps vaccination and diabetes mellitus in childhood.

This paper considers the hypothesis that mumps vaccine may be an environmental factor for childhood diabetes and the difficulties assessing the available information about this. A review was undertaken of the published literature about mumps or mumps vaccine and diabetes mellitus in childhood. There has been considerable speculation about the role of wild mumps virus and mumps vaccine in the onset of childhood diabetes. Available data about this is incomplete and difficult to interpret partly as several factors are thought to be involved in the development of childhood diabetes. Well-designed and long-term studies about the use of mumps vaccine and incidence of childhood diabetes could be done. The general approach used in this paper could be applied to study the health effects of other vaccines.