By Emily Willingham, Forbes
Have you ever been invited to a chicken pox party? If so, please turn down the invitation and get the vaccine instead.
chickenpox (Photo credit: gagilas)
The idea is not a new one: Get your child infected with the latest “childhood disease” going around, get it over with, and move on with your life. In the age before vaccines, despite the risks, it was one way for families to deal efficiently with infectious disease that wasn’t a guaranteed death sentence. Having the whole family sick at once meant, theoretically, less lost productivy and wages and less school missed. But sometimes, it also meant death, as occurred with one mother in the early 1900s who lost all her children to measles after attempting the purposeful infection tactic.
Unlike measles, chicken pox is a disease that many of us with young children can remember having had. The chicken pox vaccine became available in the mid-1990s, so those of us born before that time lived through our own bouts with the disease. What we probably didn’t fully grasp if we were young enough was that having the infection requires a lengthy quarantine from other children–adding up to two weeks of missed school and, for our parents, some juggling and fancy moves to ensure childcare during that period. Unlike many, I had chicken pox when I was 13–caught from a much younger sibling–and do remember very well those two missed weeks of school, and the dangerously high fever and delirium I experienced from having the infection at an older age, when it can be much worse. Indeed, just this year, it put an octogenarian Barbara Walters in the hospital .
But now there’s a vaccine. It’s coverage isn’t 100%, but it’s good enough–98% with the two-dose regimen –to protect most children who receive it, even around infected peers, and to reduce symptoms in those who do get infected. And that’s a good thing, not just because of productivity saved and schooling continued but because of the growing body of evidence suggesting a link between chicken pox and increased risk of stroke in children . And because while most of us experienced chicken pox as relatively benign–perhaps some lingering scarring, at most–it can kill pregnant women and threaten newborns infected maternally, lead to severe complications in the immunocompromised, and later in life in a third of people who have it, rise again like a zombie virus to cause the extremely painful condition known as shingles .
Read the full article by Emily Willingham, Forbes.
