No, don't worry, I don't have either. But good old Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report has news on both of these diseases, in a nice break from "all flu all the time."
Murine typhus: a nasty flea-borne disease, usually treatable with antibiotics, related to but different than epidemic typhus, which is lice borne, and was what killed Anne Frank. This outbreak is from Austin, Texas, where people caught it from cats that caught it from opossums. Beware the marsupial!
Mumps: an outbreak of an old scourge that is becoming more common because of people not getting the full MMR series for their kids. The neat feature of this particular mumps outbreak: it occurred among an unnamed Orthodox Jewish community and its spread basically maps out Orthodox life in the northeast: brought to camp in the Catskills by a kid from the UK, spread to Borough Park, Monsey, Kiryas Joel and Ocean County, NJ (Lakewood) once camp was over and school started, then to Quebec over Sukkot.
MMWR always leaves us with a moral or two, in this case I suggest, once more, that you and your kids get shots, and that you stay away from opossums. The overriding moral, as always, is that MMWR is a fine example of our tax dollars at work. And I mean that in all sincereity, sarcastic libertarian though I may be.
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