Chickenpox vaccine - yes or no?

[sayitwithme]

Interested in experiences, thoughts or opinions, strong or indifferent, on the concept of vaccinating our kids against chickenpox. I believe it's part of the routine vaccination program in the States. Should it be offered here in the UK? It currently costs around £100 to have the vaccine in the UK - would you pay/have you paid? If not, why not?

Call it a straw poll if you will.

Well not to me, tbh. But it is your decision to make.

Ikaty, complications from chickenpox are very rare so it doesn't make sense to vaccinate everyone against a mild illness when the trade off is a lifetime of boosters or potentially no immunity at a time when complications are more likely.

mmelindt - I believe the 1 in 1000 figure is the risk of complications which can include, most commonly, diarrhoea. Ear infections can also occur, which can potentially lead to deafness, as could any ear infection not caused by measles but again this is rare. It doesn't mean that 1 in every 1000 children with measles will get a serious, longterm complication.

I thought it would be a mild disease. It wasn't for my children. If I could go back in time I would go for the vaccines without a shadow of a doubt.

just to go back to the earlier point about herd immunity - this is one of the things that really irritates me about the whole vaccination argument. There are all these meaningless scare statistics that if less than, for instance, 93% of kids are vaccinated, there will be a measles outbreak... the reality is that MANY of these kids will have had single vaccines but because they weren't done by the NHS they won't show up on the statistics. As far as my GP knows, my 3dc have not had a single jab... the reality is that in fact ds1 has had measles/bcg/tetanus, ds2 has had measles/tetanus, and dd will have measles too. so the percentages bear little or no relation to the real situation.

everybody seems to accept that antibiotics shouldn't be overused because the illnesses they are used for mutate and become stronger over time... and it seems to me that vaccinating against what are (mostly) mild childhood diseases is going to have exactly the same effect on those diseases... weakening natural immunity/ability to fight back, and mutating the disease into something far stronger.

childhood diseases are dangerous for a small minority of children. and vaccines are dangerous for a small minority of children. we all have to make our own informed decision about which risk we prefer to take - but i do hate the evangelism/self righteousness that comes from the pro-vax lobby who would like to see every child forcibly jabbed...

Excellent posts mrsr

"...the trade off is ... potentially no immunity at a time when complications are more likely."

But remember my previous post, bubbley, in that, just like having the vaccine, contracting the illness naturally as a child also does not necessarily guarantee that you will have immunity at a time when complications are more likely. So I don't think you can call this a trade off IMHO.

my girls were/are both born and immunised in NSW (Australia) and have CP jabs. There is no guarantee they wont get CP, but if they do it will be mild.

My DS was little in the UK and so wasn't jabbed, and he got CP and he (and DH) were horribly, horribly ill for 3 weeks, hardly ate, lost weight, took ages to properly recover (and he was, and is again, a healthy, robust child).

You can't really argue that its a 'mild' illnnes, any more than you can argue the 'flu is mild - there is a huge variation in the severity of the disease and how it can effect people.

MrsR
But that is based on your impressions and conjecture, not on facts. I am not one of the "vax lobby" and certainly do not advocate compulsory vaccinations. That is for the parents to decide.

Bubbley
Diarrhea is listed as a symptom of measles, not a complication on the NHS website. There is also a list of more common complications such as earache, laryngitus, croup and bronchitus. Serious complications include febrile fit, pneumonia encephalitis, hepatitis.

I am now in NSW. But DS was 20mo when we got here and the jab is routinely done at 18mo. He is now 3.2 and still hasn't had it done.

CP in a child is usually mild, with rare exceptions. However - once the varicella virus is in the body, it hides in a nerve somewhere, and can later be triggered to cause shingles in that nerve.

The vaccine is a live attenuated virus. There have been examples of attenuated viruses going "wild" again - ok, so it's "only chickenpox" but it means that I would deliberately be introducing a virus into my child's body that could cause a much nastier illness later in his life, should anything else happen to him.

He may never come across chickenpox in life - he may avoid it entirely. But if I vaccinate him, he doesn't have that choice - the virus is in his body.

So, no, I would not CHOOSE to vaccinate him. But I may not GET the choice because of where we now live, depending on how draconian the authorities become re. him going to school without it. I don't want to home-educate him - he is far too social a little boy to do that to him - so when he is of near-school age, I will have to decide what to do.

If there is a risk of death vs unquantifiable, unknown risks of vaccine that seem not to include death by any direct means then personally I will choose the vaccination for my child. My DS has had the CP immunisation as we are in Australia. Initially I was ambivalent as I always thought of it as not that big a deal but when I learnt it could be fatal that changed my mind. There was an article on the news here about a few families who had lost their child to CP complications & they were trying to raise awareness. It was heartbreaking of course but the facts stood for themselves in theses cases.

Vaccinations have been one of the most amazing developments of the last century.

Just imagine what it was like 100 years ago or in the developing areas of the world where children are not routinely vaccinated. - you may have had 6 children and only 3 grow up into their teens because of whooping cough, diphtheria, typhoid....TB...small pox....

Oh yeah, that sounds ace doesn't it? Lets go back to a time like that in the UK hey?

There are people in the world today who walk 30 miles with small children and no shoes and queue for days to get their children vaccinated. We are soo lucky in the UK to have the luxury of rejecting a vaccination for our children.

Don't protect your children if you feel strongly about it but don't play down in any way what a wonderful development vaccines have been and the massive value they have brought to the world. And don't be so mean as to imply that people who DO protect their children are daft.

Millions upon millions of children across the world have been vaccinated, most adults in the developed world have had at least a few vaccinations....oh look, nothing awful has happened to ALL those people, just a thought hey......modern vaccinations may actually be pretty safe and a quick, easy option to protect people from awful viruses that can kill and harm.

Sayitwithme- but the vaccine is LESS reliable than actually having CP as far as conferring immunity goes.

ikaty - too simplistic by far. There have been lots of developments in the last century, notably in hygiene, clean water, sewage systems etc. AS WELL AS medical advances - you can't say it's all changed just because of the vaccines.

I didn't say it was all because of vaccine but you can't be really in so much denial that you don't see what a massive difference they did and continue to make??

iKaty - just imagine taking your child along for a vaccination, discussing whether you think they should have one of them (the appt was for multiple vax) - the vax being done against your wishes ("oh, don't worry so much, it's all for the best"), and being left with a child who is very ill, has recurrent health problems, as well as severe autism.

what a wonderful gift to the world, huh? (the vaccination, obviously, not my dd)

this is NOT a black and white argument.

most vaccines are safe for the majority of people.

whether they are as effective as the manufcutrers like to claim remains ot be seen in most cases (althouhg the stats so far are not looking good).

if the vaccination programme is so great, how come there are outbreaks of mumps amongst university students nearly every year?

if herd immunity works so well, how come there are outbreaks of diseases vaccinated against when uptake rates are over the magic 95%?

it is not a black & white issue, and those who claim it is are the ones who really are daft, whether they do or don't vaccinate.

i found it incredibly difficult making the decisions about which vaccinations to give and which not, and there are still times when I wonder whether I made the right call or not. There is a ton of information out there pro/anti, and plenty of doctors who are dubious about various vaccines. And as soon as you start looking at studies and statistics, you realise how difficult it is to 'find' the facts. For instance, soon after the polio vaccine was introduced, the criteria for reporting polio were changed... so it appeared that there had been a large drop in numbers, but in fact there had simply been a change in the requirement to notify which ruled out the majority of cases. I will try to find a link to this info. But as with anything to do with statistics, you have to be very careful about taking them at face value.

This quote from Trevor Gunn "Comparing Natural Immunity with Vaccination"

"the classification of a disease will have an impact on the number of cases of a disease. For example, prior to 1955 if you had paralytic symptons arising from a gut microbe, lasting for over 24 hours, this would have been called paralytic poliomyelitis. However, after 1955 the paralysis had to last for 14 days before it would be classed as paralytic polio. Since the majority of polio cases were resolved within a few days, thousands of cases were reduced to dozens by this simple reclassification"

whether or not you accept that this is true, it does at least demonstrate the point that even when you are looking at 'facts', there are still huge grey areas

that's very interesting, mrsr, thanks

I would agree - trying ot find reliable, unbiased information can be very hard.

I have often found, for example, docs and nurses are unwilling to answer (natural) questions about vaccination - lots of sweeping dismissal.

silverfrog absolutely - i can remember arguing with GP 9 years ago about my not wanting to give ds1 the polio vaccine, because at the time it was the live virus. He told me I was being ridiculous, and that the fact that the only known cases of polio in the UK at the time were as a direct result of the live vaccine was no reason not to vaccinate, it was almost nearly completely safe!

Cut to 6 years later when ds2 is due his polio vaccine, and all the NHS material applauds the fact that the new vaccine is so much safer than the old one, because it's no longer a live one. well, yes, funny that, I'm rather glad I stuck to my guns and didn't vaccinate him.

everybody seems to accept that antibiotics shouldn't be overused because the illnesses they are used for mutate and become stronger over time... and it seems to me that vaccinating against what are (mostly) mild childhood diseases is going to have exactly the same effect on those diseases... weakening natural immunity/ability to fight back, and mutating the disease into something far stronger.

What a load of complete rubbish. I don't know where to start!

Using antibiotics doesn't cause mutated illnesses by affecting your immune system's ability to fight them off. If used incorrectly they can allow variants of bacteria to thrive that are immune to the antibiotic. Nothing to do with your immune system at all. The reason that is a really bad thing to happen is because antibiotics are an amazing thing that save many many lives. The prospect of a world without them is very frightening. It's not that they shouldn't be used because they are a bad thing, it's that they are such a precious resource that they need to be protected by being used sparingly and when they are used, used correctly.

Vaccinations work in an entirely different way. They stimulate your own immune system to provide a defence against the disease. The more they are used the better because ultimately the disease can be eradicated altogether (smallpox). The way they work is by enabling your body to fight the disease more effectively, they don't weaken it at all! Diseases don't become immune to vaccinations and develop into something stronger because of them, because the vaccine isn't what fights the disease. It's your immune system that fights the disease, using the information it has gained from the vaccine to help it.

I think I probably would take the CP vaccine if it was offered as routine. My DD had it when she was 3 and it was relatively mild, however she gave it to my 11 wk old DS who became really poorly with it, not to the point of hospitalisation, but he was very unwell. He got a secondary infection that caused diarrhoea along with it. He also ended up having shingles when he was 2, which left him unwell for weeks. Of course he was too young to have been vaccinated anyway but if DD had been vaccinated then he wouldn't have got it.