Why should I ask for buccal or oral swab specimens in addition to the serum sample?
Buccal and oral swab samples enhance the ability to laboratory-confirm a mumps infection and can provide additional information (sequence analysis to obtain the mumps genotype) to aid epidemiologic investigations. Because serologic tests cannot differentiate between an exposure to vaccine and an exposure to wild-type mumps virus, it is necessary to obtain other clinical samples to determine the genotype (wild-type vs. vaccine).
