The number of cases of mumps in third-level colleges across the State continues to rise and students attending Dublin's Trinity College are the latest to succumb.
The Eastern Regional Health Authority (ERHA) confirmed yesterday that its Department of Public Health is working with student health services at the college to offer the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination to any student who hasn't already received it.
It has provided a similar service for students attending St Patrick's College, Maynooth, where there have also been a number of cases.
Exact figures for the number of cases of mumps in both colleges were not available last night, but an ERHA spokeswoman said a total of 64 cases had been reported so far this year, compared to 20 for the whole of last year. "Thirty-four of these cases have been reported in the past six weeks, and 19 of them in the last two weeks," she said.
Dr Davida de la Harpe, a public health specialist with the ERHA, advised 16- to 24-year-olds attending third-level colleges in the eastern region to get the MMR vaccination.
Some 91 cases of mumps have been reported in the Midland Health Board region in the past month, many of them at the Athlone Institute of Technology. Cases have also been reported at Letterkenny Institute of Technology.
The Western Health Board has had reports of 35 cases, some of which are among students attending the National University of Ireland, Galway, and the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology in Galway and Castlebar.
National Disease Surveillance Centre figures show that to date this year there have been four times more cases of mumps reported than over the same period last year.
The crisis in accident and emergency services reached a new low yesterday when one Dublin hospital was reported to have run out of trolleys for patients. Tallaght Hospital's A&E unit was so overcrowded at one stage it had to "seek protection" from other hospitals by diverting ambulances to them.
The Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) claimed there were 59 patients on trolleys awaiting beds at the hospital and that one patient from a road traffic accident had to wait on an ambulance trolley as there was no trolley available in the A&E department.
However, a spokeswoman for the hospital said last evening that there were at that stage just 29 patients on trolleys. The INO said there were a total of 175 patients on trolleys in A&E units across the State yesterday.