Anyone who has A person who has had chickenpox has one particular memory: an unrelenting, overwhelming itch.
Ciara DiVita was only 3 years venerable when she contracted the virus, but she remembers it well — along with the kitchen gloves she had to wear to prevent scratching herself. She also recalls being taken to meet her cousin while covered in blisters, in the hope that she would intentionally infect them.
DiVita, now 30, was second in the chain because her parents took her for chickenpox from an infectious friend. “I imagine the chain continued and my cousin gave it to someone else on a date with chickenpox,” he says.
Much has changed over the past three decades, most notably the development of the chickenpox vaccine, which means the virus is no longer the childhood rite of passage it once was.
Thanks to the success of the vaccine, today’s children are much less likely to become infected at school or on the playground.
Chickenpox parties are also largely considered a relic of the past – a strategy that many Gen Xers and Millennials indulged in before vaccines became routine. But like the virus itself – latent, opportunistic – they have not completely disappeared.
Before the vaccine existed, chickenpox, caused by the varicella-zoster virus, seemed inevitable. In temperate countries such as the UK and USA, about 90 percent children became infected with the virus before puberty (in tropical countries, the average age of infection is approx higher).
This has nothing to do with chickens. The name of this spotty, scratchy and highly contagious disease probably comes from the French word for chickpea, chick-pea, according to one theorybecause the round nodules caused by the virus resemble them in size and shape. Although most cases in infants are bland, adolescents and adults are at greater risk of developing sedate complications.
According to Maureen Tierney, associate dean for clinical research and public health at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, that’s when the idea to “end it” came up.
“You tried to get your child sick when they had the highest risk of not having complications,” Tierney says, explaining that generally speaking, the older the patient, the more sedate the infection could be.
Although chickenpox-shingles in children is usually a bland, self-limited disease, in adults it can be much more severe and sometimes life-threatening.
“I had an otherwise healthy adult patient who died of varicella pneumonia when I started practicing,” Tierney says. “You never forget these scenarios.”
The virus spreads quickly through respiratory droplets and contact with the fluid released from the characteristic blisters, which means that if one child becomes infected, the next one, if unvaccinated, will likely be siblings and classmates.
Before the advent of social media, the idea that children should intentionally infect each other spread just as quickly through communities—in schoolyard conversations, in church groups, and in pediatric waiting rooms—leading to the popularity of so-called chickenpox parties.
Parents swapped advice on oatmeal baths and calamine lotion, and arranged for children to be gathered together when it was thought one of them might be contagious – even though the practice was never an official medical recommendation.
“They figured if something like this was going to happen to my baby anyway, it might as well happen in a controlled environment,” says Monica Abdelnour, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. “Families were ready to encounter this infection, deal with it and then move on.”
Although most children who get chickenpox feel well again within a week or two, about three in 1,000 people infected experience sedate complications, such as pneumonia, sedate bacterial skin infections, encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) or meningitis.