To hunt down these bastards who exposed my son to chicken pox

OP the world is full of people like this. Hope your DS is feeling better soon. It’s an anxious time for them now without all of this going on!

I had no idea a vaccine was available in the UK!! None of my kids (older teens) have had chicken pox, despite being exposed many times.

Luckily DD was born in a country that vaccinates for chickenpox, I don’t understand why we don’t just do it in the UK, it’s horrible, I had chicken pox as a kid and still have scars. My family in the Uk just pay to have their kids vaccinated tbh (it’s worth the money to do it) . If you don’t vaccinate theres clearly a risk of picking it up.

But it is awful to expose your kids on purpose to other people when they have chickenpox, it’s an awful experience. I hope your son feels better soon OP.

Wise Brown Owl. .. yes, it was a thing, but my kids were pretty miserable with it.

You pay for a vaccine. One year when my children were small I decided to forfeit the family holiday to give them the mmr and chicken pox vaccine before school started.

Yeah I've never had chicken pox either and haven't really thought about it because I'd not heard of anyone having chicken pox for years and years. I was looking at vaccines for a country I'm considering visiting and it did list chicken pox vaccine as a recommended one for people that missed the childhood one. I'd never considered I'd need vaccines to visit the UK though!

As your child reacted to the vaccine, he is actually very lucky to have caught CP as a child. He will now have better immunity through out adulthood.

He can still contract Shingles as an older adult, usually when he is stressed or vulnerable, Your son might tolerate the vaccine for Shingles when he is in middle age. It's a new one called Shindrix.

Agree!

We’ve had some terrible infected chicken pox cases on our wards over the years. Also even a couple that it’s caused rare brain infections too, It can be truly hideous for some people.

My DM sent me to all the chicken pox parties going with no success too

I’m a teacher who is missing the first day back due to norovirus. Someone sent their child to nursery with it so my son got and now me. So selfish.

Agree with this. I’ve never had chicken pox and know as an adult it can be very serious

The big hole in the argument about keeping children home is the nature of the virus itself.

It's a clever virus - quarantine isn't the way to prevent its spread because patients are contagious before they show symptoms.

Before the vaccine was available people had CP parties in my area (US). After the vaccine was introduced, very few children caught the wild virus. Obviously, people wilfully or willingly exposing their children to CP were able to spend a few weeks dealing with sick children - depending on the size of the family, this might mean quite a few weeks. I was a sahm and spent a month seeing my four young DCs get it in turn. People sent their children to play with mine and try to catch it. Doing it deliberately meant they could conscientiously keep their children home even when they weren't showing symptoms, so avoiding people with lowered immunity was possible.

It's not that people "like chickenpox" - it's much milder in children than in adults, and getting it was the only way to confer immunity back in the day, despite the shingles risk later in life.

This was also during the days of live polio vaccine and parents were aware of the need to avoid grandparents or family or caregivers who might be in poor health or immunocompromised after their baby received the live vaccine, and the high importance of thorough hand washing after changing diapers or handling diapers.

The NHS is limping along - failure to provide free chickenpox virus is a bad decision.

Being vaccinated doesn't mean you won't get the disease, you will have milder symptoms and usually recover quicker. The family was inconsiderate to have the kids outside playing width others knowing perfectly he had it

He'll probably be able to go to school next week so only miss the first few days Best thing is to catch them young, all mine had them under 5.
I know its upsetting for him but the yr7s will still be getting used to everything when he s able to start and he'll make plenty of friends.

Both boys should have been vaccinated.
Our school requires a certificate of full vaccination to start at age five.
Hopefully no pregnant women were in contact with the poxy chap.

OP I'm sending you a big hug. There really are some horrid replies on here.

Moving up to high school is a big thing for him. You must both feel gutted right now. Hopefully in a few weeks he'll be settled in. Mine starts this morning. I've been awake since 4 xx

That’s interesting thanks for sharing. I had the bloody anti vax brigade in my head at the time (20 odd years ago) so I guess I only did the mandatory ones. Stupid me.

Interestingly Australia only gives a single dose as standard (and free). So the effectiveness does wear off - a double dose is much better for longer protection (with the second dose recommended between 18 months and 14 year). I'm now considering getting my son the second dose in case he wants to travel to an unvaccinated country (like the UK) down the track.

Posted upthread about this. It was a little more involved than just cost, and the UK is currently considering the best way to introduce it into the vaccine programme because research suggests that combining it into the MMR vaccine gives a higher risk of adverse reaction. Research also suggests that natural immunity gives a much lower incidence of recurrence of the disease - there is a significant rate of breakthrough infection with the vaccine.

It sucks but you need to be upbeat with your son. He won't have any problem making friends. Main thing to focus on is getting better and scar prevention - he'll be better in no time.

Its a much smaller risk because the vaccine is a much weakened version of the virus that causes chicken pox. That virus from the vaccination has almost no chance of surviving its encounter with a healthy immune system, so it does not cause disease, does not go dormant in nerves and it triggers enough of an immune response to protect children from infection for the future.
Whereas with an wild CP case the virus has a much greater chance of embedding itself in the nerves near the spinal cord to re-emerge as shingles when someone is unwell and immune suppressed later in life.

CP parties were a thing here too, but it's part of the childhood vaccination schedule now in most developed countries.

It's not considered better to develop natural immunity. The NHS tried to include it in the childhood Vax schedule at the time the dratted Dr Wakefield was spewing his half-baked theories about vaccines, and parents were panicking. Vaxcination rates went down across the board. The idea was shelved and never dusted off and reintroduced.

Given that there is ample evidence from the rest of the developed world that vaccination is safe and efficacious, I can only guess that it's leadership incompetence or cost or a combination of the two that is holding the NHS back.

Our children are all vaccinated against CP in the normal routine immunisations in Australia. My daughter still got it in Portugal (she was 19 at the time) and had it quite bad. I’m not sure if the vaccine wears off perhaps over time? I’m shocked it’s not standard somewhere like the UK to be honest.

Where CP causes more serious illness there is usually an underlying cause or vulnerability. For the vast majority of children chickenpox is mild and catching it naturally is thought to build a better, longer lasting immunity than with vaccination - which by the way, does not give complete immunity to actually catching the disease, but reduces the chance of passing it on. The UK doesn’t vaccinate routinely, partly for this reason and partly because currently, expert thinking is that vaccination can actually be counter productive with CP.

When you get chickenpox as a child, the DNA stays in nerve cells, giving it the capability of reactivating years later as shingles. But being exposed to children carrying the virus later in life is thought to have a protective effect, exposing people to small doses of the virus which act as a booster to the immune system and help to prevent the chickenpox DNA in cells from flaring up again.

One of the concerns is that if most children received a chickenpox vaccine, the disease would no longer circulate in the population to the same extent and that booster effect would be removed, possibly causing adult immunity to wane faster and leading to more shingles cases.

There is ongoing research to suggest that the anticipated rise in shingles cases hasn’t happened in countries who routinely vaccinate against CP and vaccine experts in the UK are still debating the best way of introducing a vaccine into existing childhood immunisation programme - the JCVI have recommended adding it to the existing MMR vaccine, but this gives a slightly higher risk of convulsions, so for now the single vaccine remains available privately by choice. So the question of whether or not to vaccinate isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

Those who have been vaccinated against chickenpox can still get the disease, but* * they usually have milder symptoms with fewer or no blisters and a mild or no fever. They are sick for a shorter period of time than those who are not vaccinated and shedding is reduced so the chance of passing on the disease to others is less. But the vaccine doesn’t prevent shingles if you do get CP.