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Comment by RobertRoberts | Hacker News Reader

You are getting voted down, but I _wanted_ all my kids to get chicken pox. We tried to get them together with other kids that have it so they could get it.

Everyone got chicken pox decades ago, it was expected. No one cared. Why does anyone care now?

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Because Shingles is awful, for one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles

This is _exactly_ the reason why we wanted our kids to get chicken pox!

Or at least that is the story we have all been told. I know personally at least 3 elderly people that have had shingles (or do right now) that had chicken pox as kids.

You misunderstand. Shingles are a resurgence of chickenpox when you're old and your immune system is too weak to fight it off. Chickenpox is herpes. It hides in your body, but as long as you're healthy, your immune system doesn't have much issue fighting it off. When you get old, then it can come back and be potentially deadly.

That's the wrong logic. Getting chickenpox disease makes shingles possible, as the body replicates the virus and then it lies dormant to become reactivated decades later as shingles. If you avoid chickenpox disease through vaccination, you have a 50/50 chance of avoiding shingles entirely and if you do still get it, it will be milder because there was less replication when you had chickenpox.

http://www.nfid.org/publications/factsheets/varicellaadult.p...

Getting chickenpox on purpose is not as good or better than getting vaccinated for it.

This has been the logic up until the day a chicken pox vaccine was created. Some people have worse reactions to vaccines than just scars and itching.

Shingles and adult chickenpox are the reasons the UK National Health Service does not vaccinate against chickenpox.

https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/childrens-health/...

They do vaccinate pregnant women who never got chickenpox and people with weakened immune system, though.

That's quite interesting, my government recommends people (specifically children it seems, however) get the vaccination. I'll have to read into that, thanks for the link.

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/immunization...

I had chickenpox as a kid and I would never wish it on my children. Besides being absolutely miserable for a week and having to sit in a tub or shower all day to avoid the itch, it left lifelong scars on my forehead and other areas.

Pretty much everybody born before 1984 had it (I've seen numbers as high as 95% of all adults). It was common practice to infect your children with it during a certain "safe" age range where it was just a miserable week long rash rather than a life-threatening event. There was no vaccine until then and it definitely wasn't common practice to use it on the childhood vaccine schedule until much later.

Most adults having children now may not even know the vaccine exists and just assume their children will have to go through a week of the pox to get them immunity.

Chickenpox can be deadly: https://www.cdc.gov/features/preventchickenpox/index.html

Please read up on diseases before you try to infect your children with them.

Again, _everyone_ got it when we were kids. You can die of a cold if your body is weak enough.

But there is now a vaccine that can prevent it. One which has no other side effects. There is no reason not to get it.

I was raised as you were regarding this. However, I did have my kids vaccinated against chicken pox. Probably because my wife was researching the herpes virus at the time (she's a doc) and insisted.

A few people probably died.

Repeating yourself doesn't make it sound any less ignorant. You are not a good parent in 2018 if you're intentionally getting your kid sick with chickenpox instead of getting them vaccinated instead.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/acip-recs/index.html

It is an ACIP recommended vaccine for at least a decade, which means all state Mediciad recipients can get it for free or for a low cost co-pay. There is no good reason why any child is getting chickenpox today.

Right, it's only been on the childhood vaccine schedule for 10 years. Most people don't know that nor that there's even a vaccine available for it. Chickenpox is such a mild childhood event that it's widely just assumed that your children just need to get infected with it and a week later they have lifetime immunity. Something like 95% of all adults today had Chickenpox as a child and most people have probably forgotten the event.

10 years for a vaccine against a generally mild week long childhood rash is not really enough time or importance to enter the general public consciousness and it's not really a sin to get your kids infected with it. You're judging billions of people with your own ignorance of their lives.

>Right, it's only been on the childhood vaccine schedule for 10 years. Most people don't know that nor that there's even a vaccine available for it.

Indeed, this thread is how I learned there is a vaccine for it.

When I was a child, and for generations preceding me, it was very common (almost universal) to seek out children with Chickenpox and to get your children infected with it (something like 95% of all adults alive today went through this ritual). The reasoning being that the childhood version of it is relatively mild while getting it fresh as an adult was potentially deadly. I think when I was growing up the guidance was to get your kids the Chickenpox between the ages of 5-9. You'll notice the CDC guidelines points out certain age ranges as being dangerous, but curiously for the rest it's not much of a big deal.

Since childhood infection was near universal, adults could easily take care of the children since none of them would likely get a new and potentially dangerous infection and for the children they got a week out of school and an itchy rash about as bad as a run-in with poison ivy -- another very common childhood right-of-passage in my part of the world.

The vaccine simply didn't exist and wasn't in common use until I was well into CDC "dangerous" territory, but I had already had the pox by then anyways.

Another anecdote, I have an adult uncle who didn't get Chickenpox as a child and ended up with it in his 30s, spent a spell in the hospital and had a very very rough time. I remember the discussions about it with my Grandmother where she was chastised for not having had him infected as a child properly.

The connection between Chickenpox and the Shingles wasn't even really understood until the late 50s or 60s and I don't believe it really started entering popular consciousness as a related disease until at least the late 80s though it was widely known as being a disease of the elderly. My guess is that most people still don't know that there even is a vaccine for it.

Point is, there are literally billions of people who've been through the childhood Chickenpox event, and it was the social norm until very recently to purposely infect your kids with the pox because there wasn't really much alternative and it was considered to be the safer practice.

You are right, up to two decades ago it was normal, and indeed a good practice, to try exposing kids to varicella when they are young.

Now that there is a safe vaccine, the better choice is vaccination because

1. Varicella is almost always mild in children, but in rare cases it can be dangerous (and these rare cases are more frequent and more severe of adverse reactions to the vaccine), and

2. Vaccination reduces the chances of hepes zoster (shingles) in old age, in comparison to having chickenpox.

Absolutely. I'm reacting to the display of judgy mcjudgysons on display here by the young whippersnappers who think the world was always what they started paying attention to in the last few years as they emerged into adulthood.

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