Ducks Have Mumps

Despite it being 2014, some hockey players have the mumps. Anaheim Ducks leading goalscorer Corey Perry is over his bout after missing four games, while defenseman Francois Beauchemin is still contagious and must remain quarantined.

Try getting this out of your head:

Mumps is transmitted in saliva, and lasts about a week. The rest of the Ducks will receive vaccinations soon, to try and stop this in its tracks. But it might be too late for some visitors: this diagnosis may explain the bug picked up by members of the Wild and Blues late last month. In both cases it showed up after road trips to Anaheim, and came with flu-like symptoms plus mysterious swollen jaws.

Still: the mumps is kind of a funny, archaic disease, as far as viral infections go. This is right up there with when Nick Foligno caught consumption, when Alexei Emelin suffered from dropsy, when Olli Jokinen contracted the King's Evil, and when Ben Scrivens missed a month with an imbalance of the humors.