THE OFFER – for lollipops infected with chickenpox virus – appeared on Facebook last month and quickly circulated among parents in the US who oppose vaccinating their children against diseases.
“I have PayPal and plenty of spit and suckers,” the message read. “It works too because that’s how we got it! Our round was FedEx’d from Arizona. We’ve spread cooties [chickenpox] to Cookeville, Knoxville and Louisiana!” Other parents on the same message board posted requests for shipments of a variety of chickenpox-infected items – towels, children’s clothes, rags.
By getting them to touch the contaminated items or suck on tainted sweets, these parents believe their children will get the stronger immunity that surviving a full-blown natural infection of chickenpox affords, without the hazards they say come with vaccines.
The posts advertising the infected lollipops have since been taken down, and there is no evidence that anyone bought them. But public health experts warn the practice is dangerous.
“I think it’s an incredibly bad idea, whether you’re getting it from a lollipop or somewhere else,” says Dr Rafael Harpaz, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US.
“Chickenpox can cause severe disease and death. Before the vaccine was available, we were approaching 100 children who died every year in the United States. You’re basically playing a game of Russian roulette.”
This month, law enforcement officials began clamping down. Jerry E Martin, the US attorney in Nashville where the tainted lollipops were advertised at $50 (€37) for overnight delivery, issued a warning that sending infected items “through the flow of commerce” was a federal crime, punishable by as much as 20 years in jail.
So-called pox parties, where parents would arrange play dates with infected children, were practised before the introduction of the varicella, or chickenpox, vaccine in 1995. Now some parents are turning to Facebook and other social media sites, using the internet to facilitate the exposure of their children to chickenpox and other diseases such as measles, mumps and rubella. The parents say they would rather their children acquire these diseases and develop natural immunity than run the risk of vaccine side effects.
On Facebook, the groups go by names such as “Chicken Pox Party Line” and “Find a Pox Party”. As one group notes on its Facebook page, “Consider this your ‘registry’ so that if any other members have an infected kid, you’ll be notified and have the option of setting up a pox play date.”
Kari Campbell Soto, a mother of four young children in San Bernadino County, California, founded one of the groups, “Chicken Pox Party – Southern California”, about six months ago. It now has several dozen members.
Campbell Soto says she recently took her children to a play date at the home of a young girl who had chickenpox, but her children did not get sick. She then noted on the group's page that she was looking for another infected child in the area, or an adult with shingles, which is caused by the same virus, varicella zoster.
“You can get chickenpox from someone with shingles,” she says. “I have made the other members aware that that’s what I’m looking for. I think that would be another avenue to go down.”
Although she works in the medical field, Campbell Soto says she became distrustful of vaccines after one of her children, who was vaccinated regularly, developed a neurological disorder as a toddler.
“I feel that I have a vaccine-injured child. That’s what led me to go down this road,” she says. She added that she and others in her group disagreed with sending chickenpox through the mail. “It puts a negative light on our crusade.”
Dr Walter Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center and a member of the committee on infectious diseases of the American Academy of Paediatrics, says: "We're all aware that it's illegal to do that. Whether the varicella virus would even survive in the mail is unclear, but a major concern is that the lollipops and other items would carry not only varicellabut God knows what else."
Orenstein says he is also concerned that parents are deliberately looking to infect their children. Chickenpox is rarely thought of as a severe disease, he says, but it can lead to serious complications, as well as pneumonia and other infections that crop up when children scratch their blisters. It also raises the likelihood of shingles, he says.
"The vaccine virus is far less associated with shingles than the wild virus. But my hope is not to have children suffer needlessly when they can be protected from this virus. It is not a trivial disease." – ( New York Times)
