mumps

mumps (epidemic parotitis), acute contagious viral disease, manifesting itself chiefly in pain and swelling of the salivary glands, especially those at the angle of the jaw. Other symptoms are fever, a general feeling of illness, and pain on chewing or swallowing. Mumps most often affects children between the ages of 5 and 15, the incubation period being 14 to 21 days; the acute phase rarely lasts more than 3 days. The disease is usually more severe in adults, the most common complications being pain and swelling of the testes (in 20% of adult male patients) and swelling of the meninges that cover the brain and spinal cord (in about 30% of cases). Sterility resulting from involvement of the testes and fatalities from the meningoencephalitis occur in a small minority of male cases. Other possible complications include pancreatitis and involvement of the heart or thyroid. The ovaries are sometimes affected in females. Treatment consists mainly of bed rest, intake of fluids, and the administration of analgesics. A live virus vaccine has been developed that can be given to susceptible children at 15 months.

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mumps

 or epidemic parotitis

Acute contagious viral disease with inflammatory swelling of the salivary glands. Epidemics often occur, mostly among 5- to 15-year-olds. Cold symptoms with low fever are followed by swelling and stiffening in front of the ear, often on both sides. This rapidly spreads toward the neck and under the jaw. Pain is seldom severe, with little redness, but chewing and swallowing are difficult. During recovery in patients past puberty, other glands may be affected, but usually not seriously. The testes may atrophy, but sterility is very rare. While inflammation of the brain and meninges is fairly common, chances of recovery are good. Mumps needs no special treatment, and patients usually develop immunity. Vaccination can prevent it.

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MUMPS

See M.

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mumps

an acute contagious viral disease of the parotid salivary glands, characterized by swelling of the affected parts, fever, and pain beneath the ear: usually affects children

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mumps [məmps]

(medicine)

An acute contagious viral disease characterized chiefly by painful enlargement of a parotid gland.

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Mumps

An acute contagious viral disease, characterized chiefly by enlargement of the parotid glands (parotitis).

Besides fever, the chief signs and symptoms are the direct mechanical effect of swelling on glands or organs where the virus localizes. One or both parotids may swell rapidly, producing severe pain when the mouth is opened. In orchitis, the testicle is inflamed but is enclosed by an inelastic membrane and cannot swell; pressure necrosis produces atrophy, and if both testicles are affected, sterility may result. The ovary may enlarge, without sequelae.

An attenuated live virus vaccine can induce immunity without parotitis. It is recommended particularly for adults exposed to infected children, for students in boarding schools and colleges, and for military troops.

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(language)

MUMPS - (Or "M") Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System. A programming language with extensive tools for the support of database management systems. MUMPS was originally used for medical records and is now widely used where multiple users access the same databases simultaneously, e.g. banks, stock exchanges, travel agencies, hospitals. Early MUMPS implementations for PDP-11 and IBM PC were complete operating systems, as well as programming languages, but current-day implementations usually run under a normal host operating system. A MUMPS program hardly ever explicitly performs low-level operations such as opening a file - there are programming constructs in the language that will do so implicitly, and most MUMPS programmers are not even aware of the operating system activity that MUMPS performs. Syntactically MUMPS has only one data-type: strings. Semantically, the language has many data-types: text strings, binary strings, floating point values, integer values, Boolean values. Interpretation of strings is done inside functions, or implicitly while applying mathematical operators. Since many operations involve only moving data from one location to another, it is faster to just move uninterpreted strings. Of course, when a value is used multiple times in the context of arithmetical operations, optimised implementations will typically save the numerical value of the string. MUMPS was designed for portability. Currently, it is possible to share the same MUMPS database between radically different architectures, because all values are stored as text strings. The worst an implementation may have to do is swap pairs of bytes. Such multi-CPU databases are actually in use, some offices share databases between VAX, DEC Alpha, SUN, IBM PC and HP workstations. Versions of MUMPS are available on practically all hardware, from the smallest (IBM PC, Apple Macintosh, Acorn Archimedes), to the largest mainframe. MSM (Micronetics Standard MUMPS) runs on IBM PC RT and R6000; DSM (Digital Standard Mumps) on the PDP-11, VAX, DEC Alpha, and Windows-NT; Datatree MUMPS from InterSystems runs on IBM PC; and MGlobal MUMPS on the Macintosh. Multi-platform versions include M/SQL, available from InterSystems, PFCS <mumps@pfcs.com> and MSM. Greystone Technologies' GT/M runs on VAX and DEC Alpha. This is a compiler whereas the others are interpreters. GT/SQL is their SQL pre-processor. ISO standard 11756 (1991). ANSI standard: "MUMPS Language Standard", X11.1 (1977, 1984, 1990, 1995?). The MUMPS User's Group was the M Technology Association. Usenet newsgroups: news:comp.lang.mumps.