Strict measures keep Jets mumps-free

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This article was published 18/12/2014 (3933 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You cannot exactly call the Winnipeg Jets a “healthy” hockey team, given all the recent injuries that have decimated the club’s blue-line.

While the Jets aren’t healthy, they’re also not sick. And in a strange NHL season in which the mumps — of all things — has decimated the rosters of some clubs, that fact in itself is reason enough to be thankful.

No Jets player or staff member thus far has come down with the mumps, which has run through the NHL this season and, by one recent count, has now officially affected at least 15 NHL players — and unofficially at least 22 — on at least six clubs (New York Rangers, Pittsburgh Penguins, Anaheim Ducks, Minnesota Wild, New Jersey Devils and St. Louis Blues).

What makes the Jets doubly fortunate to have remained mumps-free is the fact they’ve done it despite having played all the teams affected, including teams that were particularly decimated such as the Blues and, most recently and twice in less than a week, the Ducks.

So, if the mumps is so contagious, and it’s run rampant through the dressing rooms of so many of their opponents, has it been good fortune or good planning that has allowed Winnipeg to thus far remain free of the disease?

“A little bit of both, I think,” Jets spokesman Scott Brown theorized on Wednesday. “We’ve been very careful and very proactive in how we’ve handled this…

“But we’ve also been pretty fortunate, knock on wood, that it hasn’t snuck its way into our room.”

Brown said an ozone sterilizer True North purchased seven years ago when it still ran the Manitoba Moose — a purchase the Moose made after a staph outbreak and that was on the cutting edge of things at the time — has been working double-time, literally, in recent weeks.

The machine is used to sterilize every player’s equipment, one set at a time. Brown said what used to be a monthly process is now being done every two weeks because of the mumps outbreak, most recently Wednesday.

Brown said a different type of ozone sterilizer — purchased the first year Winnipeg returned to the NHL — has also been running every night, all night, at the MTS Centre, sterilizing entire rooms while everyone is away. He said the sterilizer is rotated on a nightly basis through the various rooms the players use — from the dressing room to the training room to the weight room and then back again.

Brown said the club also offered booster shots to players and staff following a game last month against an infected Minnesota Wild team. Brown said virtually all the players and staff members on the club got the shot.

On top of all that, Brown said there’s been a reinforcement this season of all those simple hygiene things most players learned from their parents years ago: Wash your hands, don’t share your water bottle, pick up after yourself and could you just please stop being such a pig.

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Asked about the issue over the weekend, Jets head coach Paul Maurice said his team is doing all it can to guard against infection — and then holding their breath and hoping for the best.

“We’re fortunate that we haven’t had anything remotely close to it,” Maurice told reporters.

“It’s kind of the same precautions when everybody was so worried about the flu for a long time. For us, we have an ozone process we like to think disinfects the room. We do that. We have for a while been really aware of our health and the other team’s health, too, because the fewer teams that get sick, the better it is for everybody. So the visiting team water bottles getting cleaned when they come into our building and after they leave and when we go into a building doing that.

“There’s not much… based on pretty thorough examination by our medical team, that’s the best we can do. And then the fingers are crossed.”

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @PaulWiecek