Science World Blog Seeing Spots
Seeing Spots
Last Updated (Friday, 06 March 2009 16:24) Written by Raymond Nakamura
My four-year-old has chickenpox. I won't show you any pictures. I had chickenpox as a kid and didn't even realize they now have a vaccine. She had the other shots and we weren't making some kind of stand against vaccinations, but somehow it didn't happen. A moot point now, I guess. Still, I decided to look into this a little, as a kind of penance.
Chickenpox doesn't seem to have anything to do with chickens or even avian flu. The name Chickenpox might have come from the Old English for itch, gican, or the old French for chick pea, chiche-pois, to describe the size of the red spots. I think my poor daughter would vouch for either of these descriptions.
It's quite a tricky virus and you can be contagious before you even realize you're sick. Once you've had it, you're not supposed to get it any more, which is good because if you get it as an adult, it can be much worse and you are much more prone to have complications.
After you've had chickenpox either as a child or an adult, the virus hides out in the fringes of your nervous system and can flare up much later in the form of shingles, which hits people over fifty. Now they have a shingles vaccine too.
Originally, the virus for chickenpox was called varicella and the virus for shingles was called zoster. When they figured out it was the same virus, they called it the Varicella-zoster virus, which related to the infamous Herpes simplex virus group.
The vaccine is a thinned out version of the live virus. Young children get the shot after they're about one, and then a booster later on around kindergarten. It is recommended to avoid complications as a child and an adult, although some people have wondered about the implications of widespread use of the vaccine. It hasn't been around long enough to know if the vaccine has any affect on getting shingles later. It also makes sense for economic reasons, at least in the States.
What's your take on vaccinations?
