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

[littleredbumblebee]

User name changed as outing

went on a caravan holiday last week for 5 nights and my son who is 11 played with some kids from other families and had a great time- all good

On the last night one of the smaller boys was running around with no shirt on and he has spots, one of the other families asked and his mum said oh he has chicken pox but we though getting away would do him good.

I told her my son had never had chicken pox and said I bloody hoped my son was not going to come down with them. One of the other parents also said they should not have brought the kid. Basically it ended up with them going inside the caravan in a huff. The next day we all left

So today the day before my son is use to start at high school he woke up covered in spots and now has chicken pox and won’t be in for his first week at high school. Tonight he is now crying saying he won’t name any friends now and he won’t know his way around and no amount of comforting will calm him down. Very few kids for his school are going to this high school and he is so upset he will have missed out on making friends.

We have been in touch with his form tutor who has been great and has said they will support him and catch him up but I could bloody scream. How can some people be so bloody selfish.

There are a lot of assumptions and a good deal of privilege behind your statement that the majority of the healthy population can shrug off a virus with paracetamol. Chicken pox can be devastating to certain populations - and you can pass it on long before you reach for that paracetamol

But most adults will have had it as children anyway.

And you are contagious way before you show symptoms, so there isn't much you can do in that regard.

The worse thing is shingles, which is really nasty.

Absolutely. Mine are young adults now and I didn't know about this vaccination either.

The OP DID get her child the first dose of the vaccination, @Newusername3kidss - but he had such a bad reaction that he was hospitalised, and the doctors told her he must NOT have the second dose!

They're not unreasonable, but medical knowledge changes and develops. Smoking causes cancer and fewer women die from childbirth if doctors wash their hands as examples. The latest evidence now points to it being better to be vaccinated than to catch chicken pox. The NHS has been an outlier among developed countries in not offering the vaccine. They really should add it to the schedule, or at the very least, raise awareness that it exists and the reasons to give it to your children if possible.

I'm 36 and never had chickenpox-can't be that rare to not ever have caught it surely? I rushed out to get the vaccine a couple months ago because my mum came down with shingles. Looking back it was a low risk catching CP from someone with a shingles rash but I panicked. Glad I had the vaccine now although I'm unlikely ever to be around kids with CP (no kids in our family) just because I know it's a lot worse in adults. You pay £75 a dose and you need two-but they are a few weeks apart, which is slightly better than £150 all in one go.

It's the fact that you are contagious before you show symptoms that makes vaccination desirable. Vaccination greatly reduces the chance of catching it so you can be pretty sure you're not unwittingly passing it to others.

CP can cause birth defects in fetuses if the mother is exposed in the first 20 weeks. I disagree that shingles is the worse thing. CP is far from the benign inconvenience it's being made out to be on this thread.

No...it's almost always better that kids ARE vaccinated against chicken pox.

The NHS are going to vaccinate children between 12 and 18 months now. They didn't before because they were worried shingles would increase as a result but the vaccine for that has been rolled out now.

That's very good news!

There has been a shingles vaccine since 2006, now mostly supplanted by a newer one (2017), so they have been slower than necessary, but great that they're rolling it out.