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Williamsburg pediatrician Dr. Jay Begun, who is also an attending physician at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, has seen his share of strep throat and runny noses lately. But he's also been seeing an uptick in mumps cases.

"It all started this summer when a teenager from England came to one of the camps in the Catskills and he contracted the mumps in England, brought it to the Catskill region and all the boys in the camp were exposed, and after that exposure they all came back to their respective communities and then started the epidemics there," Begun said.

It's an outbreak that still hasn't stopped and continues to spread in the tight-knit Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Most cases are among males, because young people are schooled separately.

Mumps is an infection that sometimes comes with fever or a rash, but the most classic presentation is swelling around the cheeks. Complications can result in viral meningitis, hearing loss, even reproductive problems.

There have been more than 1,500 cases in and around New York City but mostly in Brooklyn -- the largest outbreak in the U.S. since 2006. Stumping some parents is the fact that many of the young people becoming ill have already been fully vaccinated.

"One of our limitations is how effective the vaccine is, so on average it's 80 to 95 percent effective. So that would mean if we vaccinated 100 people, then five to 20 of them may still get mumps, even though they were vaccinated," said New York City Health Department Assistant Commissioner Dr. Jane Zucker.

"Given the large families we have in this community, commonly between six and 12 children in very close-knit quarters it is a magnet for spread of disease," Begun said. "So when active cases are introduced into the community the likelihood of mass spread is much higher."

A main concern of health officials and some doctors in the community is that parents will lose faith in the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. But they'd like to get the message across that vaccination is still one of the strongest methods to help control an outbreak.

"I will say a very important observation is that people who are vaccinated and have mumps are having much milder disease and less complications and that's very important," Begun said. "It speaks to the effectiveness of the vaccine that, in fact, we're not seeing spread outside the community."

To help control further spread of infection, the city's health department is holding special vaccine clinics in Williamsburg and Borough Park.

For more information, visit http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/imm/immmum.shtml.