Isn’t your immune system stronger? I understand how the whole build-up-a-tolerance thing works, but for 2 people, one child, one adult, who’s never been exposed to it, why’s it more dangerous to get it as an adult?
WAG: maybe because your immune system is so much stronger, it overeacts.
A dear friend got it at twenty-four after the bitch she was babysitting for didn’t bother to inform her that the brats she was babysitting had it.
She spent over two weeks in bed and wound up with several rather visible scars on her face.
I don’t see this addressed anywhere, but given that the age listed for when it becomes more severe is 13, this suggests that there is a role that sexual maturity plays in the severity of the illness.
I don’t want to open zombie threads, but two of the other threads posted comments that I want to address regarding polio.
Zsofia said:
bolding added.
Was it a case of polio being much less dangerous for infants than older children and adults, or was it a case that infant mortality was so high that the polio deaths were mixed in with all the other reasons a baby might not make it to 2 years old, so if you lived that long you probably were safe from polio? It could still be that the polio epidemic was noticed because better sanitation meant less infant death earlier.
Zsofia said:
This is probably more appropriate in a debate thread, but yes, why not vaccinate for everything? Sure, maybe we want to parse out the vaccinations, but what is the problem with vaccination vs. getting sick? Typically vaccinations are not live cultures, so they do the good work of improving the immune system and giving it the supposed stresses it needs without actually getting most kids sick.
So, you want to infect your kids such that they will be prone to shingles themselves later in life just so you potentially don’t have to suffer as much from shingles? If the vaccine isn’t using live virus, then the virus can’t hide out in their nervous systems and cause problems for them later in life.
My (admittedly limited) understanding is that polio is, in fact, less likely to be fatal and less likely to result in long term damage if you catch it as an infant. Which is not to say it didn’t cripple and kill infants, it certainly did, but not at the rate it cripples and kills older children and adults who catch it.
If you never catch chicken pox then you never get shingles, not ever. So chicken pox vaccination actually can potentially protect against two diseases.
I wonder if there is any other animal that gets chicken pox? If not, then with a massive chicken pox vaccination campaign we could entirely eliminate the disease just as we did with smallpox and are trying to do with polio and guinea worm.
And after those, we can work on Rabies. 
Nothing against this poster, just seemed like interesting timing of the creation of this username.
The minimum time from exposure to onset of illness in chickenpox is 10 days. Average is 14-16 days. 21 days appears to be the maximum time. So your friend most likely had already been exposed to chickenpox well before she babysat for those kids.
My 2 boys shared a room and played together when the oldest came down with chickenpox in February. His little brother got them in May!
That said, I agree that chickenpox is much worse in adults.
I didn’t see anything in LavenderBlue’s post that indicated how long it was after babysitting until they came down with the disease.
They had the damned rash when she showed up to baby sit. Mommy From Hell told her it was nothing. Not knowing anything about chicken pox she stayed. She very clearly got it from the kids because they were obviously in the contagious stage.
It was a thoughtless and creepy thing to do. The woman later apologized. I’d have given serious thought to suing her.
LavenderBlue
I misunderstood your original post. You mentioned she got it at 24- I thought "24 hours after she babysat " rather than at “24 years of age”. My mistake, sorry.
Okay, wiki confirms what was said about the effects being less likely on infants than adults.
Apparently the most common symptoms are flulike and go away. Only about 3% progress to nervous system attack, mostly meningitis, which is described as “self-limiting”, suggesting it goes away.
In 1% of cases, it progresses to paralysis.
Interesting.
The older name for polio was “infantile paralysis” because (I assume) it was rarely if ever seen in anyone but infants before the 20th century. So it is plausible that everyone got it, but for most it was no more damaging than a cold, but for a few, it was serious, perhaps mortal.
I caught chicken pox at 15 and had a truly miserable two weeks. My family doctor (in those benighted times, family doctors made house calls) said he had never seen a worse case and that I might have been in actual danger of dying. The worst was that I had it all over my head, it itched like hell and I thought I started going bald then. Fortunately, I have never had shingles.
Chicken pox, like some of the other diseases we routinely vaccinate for, can cause birth defects if a woman gets it while she’s pregnant. It can cause miscarriage, or fetal death at a later stage in the pregnancy. The risk is low, 1-2%, fortunately, but it’s still there, and since chicken pox is a pretty common disease it can be hard to avoid if you have other kids, or are in a profession where you’re around them.
I’ve never had it, but I got vaccinated when I was about 13. If I hadn’t been, I’d have gotten vaccinated before trying to get pregnant anyway, assuming I didn’t catch it in the meantime.
I had chicken pox twice, once as a child and then again as an adult. Luckily it wasn’t too bad as an adult (yeah I felt like crap but didn’t have a big problem with the spots themselves, no scarring etc.)
I hears from the Doctors up Beckley ways that it can make you ster-ile
Are you certain that the 2nd illness was chickenpox? I ask because it is distinctly unusual for an otherwise healthy person to experience repeat chickenpox infection.
Yeah I know it is unusual but it appears to have happened. I didn’t bother taking any precautions around the kids who gave it to me because I’d already had it.
I had that crazy shit as a 4-year-old, and according to mom I “almost died”. I don’t remember much except for being very itchy, sleeping a lot and feeling like crap, and later having scars here and there from it. Mom told me later my temperature was 106 :eek:
I guess this is really no relation to this thread… whistle :smack:
Heh… I was one of the first 3 kids to catch it in my kindergarten class. When I came back to school two weeks later, there was a total of 5, out of 27, kids attending. The other 22 were out w/ the pox. That stuff’s wicked infectious. All I remember is the itching, oatmeal baths, and my Mom telling me to quit scratching or it would scar*.
She was right, I scratched one open in the middle of my forehead, had an scar indentation that was noticeable til I was like 22.