Ever Thrown a “Pox Party”?

I vividly remember having chickenpox when I was a kid. I was probably in third or fourth grade when my big brother and I both came down with the virus. As I recall, it was awful. I had itchy blisters everywhere – including inside my eyelids. It seemed like we were kept home from school for a long time because we felt bad and were considered to be contagious, though of course one of us had probably caught it from our school anyway.

It’s hard to imagine deliberately exposing my children to something that would make them as sick as I was that spring back in the 1980s. But it’s an idea that parents have been kicking around for years, particularly when it comes to the chickenpox. I guess the theory was that children should be exposed to the virus to either have them catch it and get it over with or to boost their resistance to the disease.

The varicella vaccination wasn’t around when I was a child, but both of my children have had the first dose of the two-shot vaccine. As a parent, I worry about a lot of things, but I don’t lose sleep over . I think it has been proven time and again that vaccines help keep our children healthy and that the benefits of the shots far outweigh any potential or merely perceived risks. Hopefully, the varicella vaccination will protect my children from coming down with the virus; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that “about eight to nine of every 10 people who are vaccinated are completely protected from chickenpox.”

But parents who have concerns about vaccines are taking matters into their own hands when it comes to the chickenpox. According to the Los Angeles Times’ Booster Shots blog, also posted on the Baltimore Sun’s website, some parents who are hoping to dodge giving their kids the shot are “arranging through Facebook to pay strangers to send them ‘[licked] lollipops, spit or other items’ from kids with the illness. The idea is to expose the kids to the virus to build immunity without having to get a shot.”

Doctors quoted in the story say there are plenty of problems with that strategy. The chickenpox virus probably wouldn’t live long enough without a host to have the licked lollipop method be effective, but plenty of scarier diseases like “hepatitis B, group A strep, and staph germs” could potentially be transmitted that way. And in general, deliberately exposing a child to chickenpox could also lead them to develop additional complications like pneumonia, encephalitis or invasive group A strep if chickenpox blisters become infected.

I don’t know about you, but buying a stranger’s spit-upon candy sounds disgusting, no matter the motivation. The pox party idea seems less revolting, but the medical professionals quoted by the Booster Shots blog make it seem like a really dumb idea. But it wouldn’t be the first or last time sound medical advice was ignored.