Editorial note: This piece was co-written by Atif Kukaswadia, PhD, and Ary Maharaj, M.Ed. Atif is a writer for the Public Health Perspectives blog on the PLOS network, and Ary is a writer for Silver Seven, an SBNation blog about the Ottawa Senators hockey team. This piece is being cross-published on both platforms. Enjoy!
CHALLENGES
The environment within NHL clubs are relatively controlled, with most players together a majority of the time — from on-ice, rooming together on the road, and flying with charter planes. Thus, when one player contracts the illness, it’s relatively hard to contain it other than by separating a player out completely. But with mumps having a long incubation period of about 16 to 18 days, although it can be as short as 12 to as long as 25 days (CDC), detecting that an illness is in fact the mumps can be difficult, and by that point, it may already be too late. However, for the public, this controlled environment means that what happens in the NHL may not necessarily pose greater risk. When things go wrong in sports, we generally blame it on the referees, and here, yet again, we can blame referees for increasing the public risk of an NHL mumps outbreak (sort of kidding). The ~66 referees employed by the NHL fly commercially like the rest of the public, waiting around airport terminals and going in-and-out of rinks with the public, potentially leading to increased risk.
Mr Epidemiology 
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