The Backward Logic of Chickenpox Parties

Anyone who has it had chicken pox share one distinct memory: constant, all-consuming itching.

Ciara DiVita was just 3 years old when she caught the bug, but she remembers it vividly — and the bandages she made to scratch herself. He also remembers being taken to visit his cousin covered in blisters, hoping to infect them on purpose.

DiVita, now 30 years old, was second in the chain, having been taken by her parents to catch chickens from her infected friend. “I think the chain was passed on and my cousin gave it to someone on the day of the hen party,” he says.

Much has changed over the past three decades, particularly the development of the chicken pox vaccine, meaning that the virus is no longer the childhood ritual it once was.

Thanks to the success of vaccines, children today are less likely to contract the disease at school or on the playground.

Hen parties are also considered a relic of the past – a method that many Gen X and millennials used to use before vaccines became the norm. But like the virus itself, which is hidden, opportunistic, it has not disappeared.

Before vaccination there was, chicken pox, caused by the varicella-zoster virus, seemed inevitable. In warm countries like UK and US, about 90 percent of children infected before puberty (in tropical countries they often get sick higher).

It has nothing to do with chicken. The slotchy, scratchy, highly contagious disease is probably named after the French name for chickpea, chicken, according to another theorybecause the circular strokes caused by the virus are similar in size and shape. Although most babies are mild, teenagers and adults can have serious problems.

That’s where the idea of ​​”dealing with it” came from, according to Maureen Tierney, associate professor of clinical and health research at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

“You’re trying to get your child to get the disease when they have the best chance of not having complications,” says Tierney, explaining that, often, the older the patient gets, the more severe the disease becomes.

Although varicella-zoster is usually a mild, self-limiting disease in children, it can be very serious—and sometimes life-threatening—in adults.

Tierney said: “You will never forget those experiences.”

The virus spreads quickly through breathing saliva and contact with fluids from blisters, meaning that if one child is infected, siblings and classmates may be next, if they are not vaccinated.

Before social media, the idea that children should be infected on purpose spread as quickly as it did in communities—in schoolyard conversations, in church groups, and in babysitting rooms—making hen parties popular.

Parents exchanged advice on oatmeal baths and calamine lotion and arranged for children to stay together when one thought it was contagious—even though the practice was not medically approved.

Monica Abdelnour, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, said: “Families were ready to face the disease, deal with it, and then move on.”

Although most children who get chickenpox get better within a week or two, about three out of every 1,000 who get the virus develop serious complications such as pneumonia, severe skin infections, encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), or meningitis.