I had chicken pox as a kid. I think the vaccine for it only came out after my youngest sibling was around the age for it, as she is the only one of us that got the vaccination and not the illness itself.
Fuck this mentality. Nobody deserves to suffer that shit just because you and I had to. You’re supposed to try and give your kids a better experience than you had. Vaccinate your god damn children.
I was really young when I got chicken pox, maybe 5 years old? The thing I remember most is getting winter mittens taped to my hands so I couldn’t scratch my butthole until it bled. It was TORTURE. No one should have to suffer like that if they don’t have to.
I remember getting two weeks off school, the first week was a little tough but the second week was joy.
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I had chicken pox really bad as a kid. I had from the tips of my toes to the top of my head … spots in every part of my body - EVERY PART OF MY BODY! … I even have a few left over scars from that ordeal.
I’m middle aged now and I had shingles about five years ago and it was horrible. It burns and itches and at the height of the infection it feels like you suffered from third degree burns and the damned skin itches and you keep wanting to touch it.
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Brought about by stress … I was going through a fairly stressful time with work, travelling to a new place and trying to make ends meet. Keep a good diet, exercise, eat healthy, sleep well and keep the stress down … if you mess any of those up, you’re increasing chances of that infection just creeping up. Like others have said, it’s probably best to just get the shingles vaccine.
Get that shingles vaccine asap. My Dad is the most stoic person I know when it comes to sickness and he literally CALLED ME ON THE PHONE howling about how bad it hurt. Don’t be my Dad, y’all.
Shingles can get in your eyes and cause you to go blind, too.
Get the vaccine when you can. Because you’re right, and depending which nerve path it chooses it can be bad or it can be worse
Thank you. I have a friend who went through this as an adult and ended up with nerve damage. A vaccine would have spared him that pain.
I had chicken pox twice.
Once the normal variety when I was like 6 or whatever, then when I was like 11 or so I got it again when visiting my grandma who just hosted young kids. It was largely the same, except it had rings around the spots. They did tests and confirmed it was a mutated variety of common chicken pox.
I’m terrified of shingles outbreaks because I may have two strains lying dormant in my body, but I’m “too young for the shingles vax”
Yeah, I’d get the shingles vax in a heartbeat, but I’ve gotta wait another 6 years. Meanwhile I know several people who developed shingles in their forties and have lingering issues from it (particularly ophthalmic). The vaccine needs to be tested and approved for younger adults. But I doubt that’ll happen. They’ll just wait until those of us who got chicken pox as a kid are old enough for the shingles vaccine, and who cares if we get shingles in the meantime!
I’ve always wondered if there’s a chance we make the shingles virus extinct, but never looked into whether the chicken pox vaccine prevents it entirely
Once upon a time trepanning - drilling a hole in the skull to “let evil spirits out” - was a common medical practice. We don’t do that anymore either, for what I should hope are obvious reasons.
Mercury was once used as a treatment for syphilis, among many other things. Lobotomies, radium “treatment”, cocaine and heroin was used as a treatment for children with a cough, smoking was recommended as a treatment for asthma, electroshock therapy was used for damn near everything, induced insulin comas, arsenic and lead, tapeworm diets…
You all get the point.
I think they also used malaria as a treatment for syphilis, then treated the malaria with quinine
I was just reading about that. Good grief.
I feel like two of those are more “counterpoint” than “point”.
It’s absolutely better to get chicken pox than shingles, but if you get the vaccine, you get neither. But hey, I get it, big pharma is a monster, but many that rally against vaccines also use Ozempic, and plastic surgery etc. Is RFK really onto a thing with vaccines when he’s taking steroids?
It’s also an anti-vaxx lie that vaccines somehow abuse the immune system in any way. The immune system is immensely complex to understand, let alone control. The most effective way for vaccines to work is to allow the immune system to do it’s thing. The immune system works to its full effect with vaccines, you simply do not get advanced symptoms or complications with vaccines compared to the real disease.
It’s absolutely better to get chicken pox than shingles
It’s not one or the other though. If you don’t get chicken pox you can’t get shingles
Yes, the author is stupid to be advocating for chicken pox.
Even setting aside the discomfort of chicken pox, catching chicken pox (particularly as a young child) increases the risk of shingles. Nobody in their right mind wants shingles.
Not just discomfort, it can, in some cases, leave you with permanent injury.
“long-term complications of childhood chicken pox” is one search that they don’t do
Profound hole in the “do your own research” theory: not knowing how to do thorough research
Or even having the time to do all this research I apparently need to do.
Not to mention that some research ends up behind pay walls and knowledge barriers.
Even if they get the right search terms, they’ll just keep scrolling till they find an obscure blog with an anecdote from 2 mothers which confirms their existing bias.
What do you mean I have to “read a book”? I’ll just find a wellness blog to tell me the thing I want to hear.
I had chicken pox when I was three and it’s one of my few memories from that time in my life.
Fuuuuuck these people abusing their children.
If shingles are good for a roof, why not you? Checkmate liberals
Yeah, I don’t wanna hear shit about chickenpox being good for a child. I was too young to be able to get the vaccine and because of that, there’s a chance I get the complications of getting pox that you get later in life. It wasn’t even my own parents fault, since I caught it in daycare.
Also, if I remember correctly, Japan rolled out the first chickenpox vaccines to prevent it from becoming a mass epidemic on their island nation.
Edit:
It’s shingles. That’s the complication that can happen later in life after having pox.
Chicken pox was. Miserable, and I’m didn’t have it that bad.
Give the kids the vaccine
Shingles fuckin sucks. Had it crop up when I was in 6th grade, only like 5 or 6 years after having chicken pox. Miserable week or so. Not that I’ll have to, but I wouldn’t make my kids go to school if they had shingles.
In Denmark we don’t vaccinate for chicken pox for exactly the reasons given in the post.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10075481
Universal varicella vaccination (UVV) is not currently part of the Danish National Immunization Program [4]. In the absence of a UVV program, the estimated varicella disease burden in Denmark is considerable, with 63,500 cases annually, mainly among those under the age of 5 years [5]
Oh wow.
And afaik, you guys have a decent healthcare system, so the state is paying for the consultations and treatments of the complications. The vaccine is 40€, I hope nobody goes to the generalist about it twice.
And I just found out it’s not mandatory in France either. I was convinced it was mandatory everywhere.
I hope you vaccinate for shingles then, because it can be very painful and debilitating
It may also be due to concerns with uptake. Outcomes can be worse at middling vaccination rates with varicella.
The vaccine was just after I got it. Miserable. I lived in an oatmeal bath. My poor mother got it as an adult (when we got it and gave it to her)
She was worse up in all ways.
I’d have gnawed someone’s ankle off to have gotten the vaccine instead. But especially for my mother to have gotten it.
We all had it when we were kids. A friend of mine had it really bad and he has pock marks all over his face and body, he was always the handsome one, but after that it changed him and he was never the same again.
From then on, always looking down at the ground, brooding, scratching the dirt with his feet, eating bugs, and going crazy for buckets of scraps
I had chicken pox as a kid and while it wasn’t horrible, I def could’ve done without a lesion appearing both on my dick and the roof of my mouth.
Anti vaxxers are fucking bonkers
I had dick pox too. I remember being like, 9, and dabbing that horrible yellow ointment on my foreskin and shaft. That was my first “I’m too old for this shit” moment
