Chicken Pox Parties

[BPSCG]

Once more, it's time to play Spot the Idiots.

When Trish Thackston's 7-year-old son, Connor, broke out with chickenpox recently, she quickly scheduled play dates with four families over the next four days at their Alexandria house.

The kids made art projects with glue and glitter, worked side by side on dinosaur puzzles and shared spoons, all with the intention of transmitting the illness to the healthy children. Her son, thrilled not to be sequestered from friends as he usually is on sick days, said excitedly one morning: "Who's coming over to catch my chickenpox today?"

(...snip...)

Some parents, including Thackston, are shunning the chickenpox vaccine, introduced in 1995 and considered safe and effective by most health authorities, in favor of the old-style method of exposing children to the real thing at an early age. Today's parents may remember their own moms and dads tucking sick siblings in bed with healthy ones and inviting friends over to spread the illness.

Many who choose to expose their children believe that catching the illness at "chickenpox parties" is safer and more effective than using vaccines.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Well, I didn't even know there was a CP vaccine. Actually, I think getting the disease is at least as good as vaccine, in this case because the disease is benign and rarely leads to complications. Having the disease gives you near 100% life-time protection, and I can tell you from personal experience that while kids don't suffer much, it is VERY unpleasant to catch it as an adult.

When my kids got it, I got it too, and I took twice as long to recover, ran a high feever, with muscle stiffness and pain, much like a heavy flu. But the worst thing by far was that everybody thought it was immensely funny that I had chicken pox!

Hans

 

[Jocko]

While the idea of an organized chicken pox party is creepy as hell, I hafta come down on the side of catching the damn thing and getting it over with, not unlike puberty.

The vaccine makes more sense for teens and older who managed to avoid catching it during childhood, since only then does the disease pose any significant risk. Besides, sitting in bed for a week is free. Vaccines cost money.

And to be honest, it's pretty friggin' nancy-boy to be that hung up on what is a generally harmless childhood thing.

 

[Blue Bubble]

... and I can tell you from personal experience that while kids don't suffer much, it is VERY unpleasant to catch it as an adult.

When my kids got it, I got it too, and I took twice as long to recover, ran a high feever, with muscle stiffness and pain, much like a heavy flu. But the worst thing by far was that everybody thought it was immensely funny that I had chicken pox!

Hans

Me too. I got it from my kids in 1992, and I thought I was dying ... really, really, really nasty. Worst illness of my life (so far). *Much* worse than flu in my case.

 

[Lisa Simpson]

Two of my kids had the chicken pox, one had the vaccination. As a parent, I prefer the vaccination. Besides, son #2 did have an auto-immune reaction to the chicken pox. He developed Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. And another boy he used to get physical therapy with also had an auto-immune reaction to CP, except he had a stroke. They may be rare, but they happen. The vaccination was far better.

 

[BPSCG]

While the idea of an organized chicken pox party is creepy as hell, I hafta come down on the side of catching the damn thing and getting it over with, not unlike puberty.

Allen points out that before the vaccination was available, there were 11,000 hospitalizations and 100 deaths annually in the United States from chickenpox, also known as varicella. During 2003 and the first half of 2004, the CDC reported eight deaths from varicella,

So you come down on the side that results in a greater than tenfold increase in the death rate.

Okay...

 

[Jocko]

So you come down on the side that results in a greater than tenfold increase in the death rate.

Okay...

...And a thousandfold increase in the paranoid wimp rate. Hospitalizations don't mean much to me; that's as much as symptom of our self-defeating germ phobias as anything else. 100 deaths per annum in a nation of 300 million is miniscule. I'll bet more kids catch Hep B, and we don't vaccinate for that.

Besides, have you considered how these innoculated kids will deal with chicken pox when they hit 40 or 50 and the effects of the vaccines wear off? They DO wear off, you know. And chicken pox at that age is truly deadly.

So sue me for looking at the big picture here.

 

[Darat]

"... introduced in 1995 and considered safe and effective by most health authorities,"...

Isn't that all health authorities?

 

[Snide]

"... introduced in 1995 and considered safe and effective by most health authorities,"...

Isn't that all health authorities?

You're forgetting about bigfig.

 

[Lisa Simpson]

I'll bet more kids catch Hep B, and we don't vaccinate for that.

That's news to me, since all three of my sons have been vaccinated for HepB and it's a requirement for admission to middle school.

 

[zakur]

That's news to me, since all three of my sons have been vaccinated for HepB and it's a requirement for admission to middle school.

Hell, my kids had to have the Hep B vax before kindergarten.

Ohio state law requires proof of the following vaccinations for school enrollment: DPT, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and Hep B. The state leaves it up to individual school districts whether or not to require the Chicken Pox vax. Ours doesn't, but both my kids got it as a routine part of their childhood immunizations.

 

[Rolfe]

So far as I know, they don't do the chickenpox vaccination in Britain at all. Anybody know why? (And I don't remember any "parties" when I was a kid, me catching chickenpox aged 6 or 7 was viewed as a Bad Thing, so I wonder how long this "old-style" thing has really been going on for?)

Rolfe.

 

[Lisa Simpson]

Perhaps because this is the first group of kids to get the vaccination, they don't really know how long it will last. My son's pediatrician told me "if he has to get a booster as a teenager, that's still better than getting the chicken pox." So we got him the vaccination. The other two got chicken pox in 1994, before the vaccination came out.

 

[corplinx]

Can't the chicken pox leave scars in some cases? I know a few people who have at least one scar but usually it isn't on their face.

 

[Lisa Simpson]

Can't the chicken pox leave scars in some cases? I know a few people who have at least one scar but usually it isn't on their face.

Yeah, son #2 has lots of chicken pox scars and some of them are on his face. He was only 7 months old when he got chicken pox and it was very hard to keep him from scratching. Even mittens didn't help. And then at age 5 he got shingles. Poor kid.

 

[Ziggurat]

So you come down on the side that results in a greater than tenfold increase in the death rate.

Okay...

I doubt that comparison is valid. Most of those deaths are probably adults. Unless the children in question live in houses where there are adults without immunity (I'm assuming that's not the case), this particular threat doesn't really exist. If you want to argue against having such parties rather than using a vaccine, I think you have to look at Lisa Simpson's example of bad reactions to the disease in children, not to a death rate that's dominated by adults.

 

[geni]

So far as I know, they don't do the chickenpox vaccination in Britain at all. Anybody know why?

UK vaccintion policy tends to be to wait untill someone esle has been useing it for a while.

 

[Lisa Simpson]

From the CDC:

But chickenpox can be dangerous and even deadly. Before the introduction of the varicella vaccine in 1995, approximately 4 million cases of the disease were
reported annually, including 4,000 to 9,000 hospitalizations and 100 deaths. While varicella is the greatest vaccine-preventable killer of children in the United States, only 26 percent of children ages 19 to 35 months old had
received varicella vaccine by 1997.

 

[BPSCG]

I doubt that comparison is valid. Most of those deaths are probably adults.

But vaccinating children for chicken pox shouldn't affect the number of adults who die from it. Why the precipitate drop in deaths?

 

[BPSCG]

And then at age 5 he got shingles. Poor kid.

Argh - poor kid is an understatement. I had shingles once. I described it to people as, "Remember the worst sunburn you ever had? Now think what it would feel like if someone scrubbed it with a wire brush..."

At least I was in my thirties, and I could understand what was going on. When you're five years old, it must be dreadful.

The good news is, once you've had shingles, you're done with it for life. Or so I'm told.

Hey, maybe those moms should have shingles parties, too.