Everyone knows about chickenpox – most of us had it when we were kid. So, when my daughter came out in a few spots on a family holiday, I wasn’t all that bothered. It was a “rite of passage”. Right?
We were away for two weeks, after all; lucky enough to be staying with friends in the sunshine after a mammoth 18-hour series of flights to get to Nassau in the Bahamas.
A sprinkling of red, itchy bites – for that’s what they looked like – appeared on her torso, first, followed by her face. My boomer parents brushed it off – they’d taken us to “pox parties” in the 1980s, when mums and dads and carers would flock to bring their kids to the house of a child with chickenpox. They didn’t just let us mingle – they encouraged it. They wanted us to get the virus to “get it over with”.
Everyone believed that having chickenpox was fine when you were a child, but if you got it as an adult, that’s when it was really uncomfortable – even dangerous. People also believed that you couldn’t get it twice: so, one hit when you were too small to remember it would be worth it, in the end. How wrong they were.
When my daughter’s chickenpox kicked in, it ramped up so intensely and so painfully that nobody slept for a week. She was only three and had more than 100 spots in her eyes, mouth and inside her ears. They were all over her feet, legs, torso, back and arms – she even had some in her armpits.
And then, when all we wanted to do was get her home, she was barred from flying (frustratingly but rightfully) to prevent contagion.
“Oh no, poor you, stuck in the Bahamas for another week”, came the inevitable eye-rolls and comments. Well, yes – but we couldn’t go outside, because the sun made her skin hurt even more. We couldn’t go anywhere, other than a darkened room, because we were afraid of spreading it further. She couldn’t sleep, was crying constantly, had a fever – and some of her spots where she’d itched them were infected and oozing pus. She still has scarring, a decade later.
In desperation for something that would help her – calamine lotion, perhaps – we managed to find a doctor from Florida. He took one look at her and frowned when we said she hadn’t been vaccinated. “You don’t vaccinate against this in the UK?”
The vaccine became routine in the US in 1995, you see – but until now, in the UK, you could only get the two-dose jab if you went private and paid around £200. Thankfully, however, things are about to change.
It’s just been announced that all young children in England and Wales will be offered a free chickenpox vaccine by the NHS from January next year, and I couldn’t be more relieved that other families won’t have to go through what we went through.
The jabs will be given at 12 and 18 months, as part of the existing MMR (which protects against measles, mumps and rubella); with a catch-up campaign for older children.
It’s high time we did this in Britain – we’ve been sitting in naivety for far too long. It won’t come as any surprise that the ubiquitous “pox parties”, so favoured in the eighties and nineties, backfired. My uncle is 76 – right now, decades after being taken to pox parties, he’s sick with shingles. That’s because the varicella-zoster virus (VZV) that causes chickenpox stays dormant in the body's nerve cells. It can reactivate years later, particularly in old age. Dangerous – particularly when you have a weakened immune system.
But it was dangerous then, too, even for kids. Chickenpox complications include pneumonia, encephalitis (brain inflammation) and Reye's syndrome. Catching chickenpox while pregnant increases the risk for serious illness, birth defects or premature birth.
This horrifying (and I don’t use that word lightly: I spent weeks in hospital with my daughter when she was small and had a serious health condition, so I know what “horrifying” looks like) experience of pox made me vow, when I had my second child, to get him vaccinated as soon as I could. I paid for it with pleasure.
I just hope other parents will see sense and take up the opportunity. But I’m worried that they won’t.
We live in an age of scepticism of “experts”, thanks to fear-mongering from people like US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We saw it through the pandemic; heard calls from the president to “drink bleach”. We’ve also seen the Trump administration’s recent crackdown on routine vaccines, against medical advice.
In the UK, too, there are Covid sceptics; those who state proudly that they’re “anti-vaxxed” and wear it like a badge of dishonour. We’ve seen the frothy ravings of conspiracy theorists online. We know that due to misinformation and the malign influence of these anti-vaxxers – plus savage cuts to our health budgets – fewer parents are having their children protected against life-threatening diseases like measles. As a direct result, more children are dying.
Experts now say that too many children are starting primary school without routine vaccinations – putting their own lives and those around them in danger. The UK was recently outed as the worst-performing G7 country for coverage of measles vaccines, while data this week showed that the level of MMR immunisation in London has fallen to below the WHO target for herd immunity. And a top disease expert has warned that hundreds of people could die in measles outbreaks in the next 20 years unless vaccination rates are dramatically improved.
The UK is in bad shape – and believe me, chickenpox (if your child has the misfortune of getting it) is no picnic. But there’s finally something we can all do about it: get them vaccinated. What are parents so afraid of?
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