Ciara DeVita was only 3 years old when she caught the virus, but she remembers it well — plus having to wear oven mitts to stop herself from scratching herself. She also recalls taking her for a walk with her cousin while she was covered in blisters, in the hopes of deliberately infecting them.
DeVita, now 30, was actually second in the chain after her parents caught chickenpox from an infectious friend. “I think the cycle continued and my cousin passed it on to someone else during a chickenpox play date,” she says.
A lot has changed over the past three decades, particularly the development of the chickenpox vaccine, meaning the virus is no longer the childhood rite of passage it used to be.
Due to the success of vaccines, children today are much less likely to contract infections at school or on the playground.
Chickenpox parties are also largely considered a relic of the past — a strategy many Gen X and millennial kids used to employ before vaccinations became routine. But like viruses themselves – latent, opportunistic – they have not disappeared completely.
before the vaccine existed, chickenpox, caused by the varicella-zoster virus, seemed inevitable. In temperate countries like the UK and US, about 90 percent of children contract the virus before adolescence (the average age of infection is higher in tropical countries).
This has nothing to do with chickens. The spotty, scratchy, highly contagious disease is probably named after the French word for gram, Pois ChicheAccording to one theory, it’s because the round bumps caused by viruses resemble them in size and shape. While most infant cases are mild, teenagers and adults are more likely to develop serious complications.
That’s where the idea to “get over it and get it over with” emerged, according to Maureen Tierney, associate dean of clinical research and public health at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.
“You’re trying to get your child to have this disease when they have the greatest chance of not having complications,” Tierney says, explaining that, generally speaking, the older the patient is, the more serious the infection can be.
While varicella-zoster is usually a mild, self-limited illness in children, in adults it can be much more serious – and sometimes even life-threatening.
“When I was first practicing I had a healthy adult patient who died from chickenpox pneumonia,” says Tierney. “You never forget those scenarios.”
The virus spreads rapidly through respiratory droplets and contact with the fluid released from its characteristic blisters, meaning that if a child is infected with it, siblings and classmates, if not vaccinated, are likely to become infected after them.
Before the existence of social media, the idea that children should intentionally infect each other spread just as quickly into communities – in conversations in schoolyards, church groups and pediatric waiting rooms – leading to the popularity of so-called chickenpox parties.
Parents swapped advice about oatmeal baths and calamine lotion and arranged to bring children together when someone was thought to be infectious – despite this practice never being an official medical recommendation.
“They thought, OK, if this is going to happen to my child, 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 face this transition, deal with it, and then move on.”
While most children with chickenpox recover within a week or two, about three out of every 1,000 infected experience a serious complication such as pneumonia, severe bacterial skin infection, encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), or meningitis.
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