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Another pox rant
Mar. 10th, 2005 09:43 amI made a short post earlier that needed to be longer. So here it is…
What I think most people don’t realize is that getting chicken pox when you are 5 does not give you immunity once you are 30. Immunities are forgotten by the immune system after as little as a year. The flu virus is forgotten in as little as 6 months and small pox (aka human pox) in as much as 20 years. Chicken pox immunity falls somewhere in-between the two. Since chicken pox is a pox of chickens it is naturally hard for humans to contract. Kids get it because they have questionable hygiene habits. Most adults do not get the virus because we stay clean. Most adults do not have immunity to chicken pox even if they had it as a kid.
Finally, odds of getting just varicella from random exposure is far less likely then getting something much worse. Parents are thinking it’s a good idea to go online, join an e-mail list, and then drive across the state take needles and swabs of infected kids they have never met and stick them in their own kids.
All of that aside chicken pox in humans has a fatality rate of around .00006% the vaccine has a fatality rate of 0.
What I think most people don’t realize is that getting chicken pox when you are 5 does not give you immunity once you are 30. Immunities are forgotten by the immune system after as little as a year. The flu virus is forgotten in as little as 6 months and small pox (aka human pox) in as much as 20 years. Chicken pox immunity falls somewhere in-between the two. Since chicken pox is a pox of chickens it is naturally hard for humans to contract. Kids get it because they have questionable hygiene habits. Most adults do not get the virus because we stay clean. Most adults do not have immunity to chicken pox even if they had it as a kid.
Finally, odds of getting just varicella from random exposure is far less likely then getting something much worse. Parents are thinking it’s a good idea to go online, join an e-mail list, and then drive across the state take needles and swabs of infected kids they have never met and stick them in their own kids.
All of that aside chicken pox in humans has a fatality rate of around .00006% the vaccine has a fatality rate of 0.
