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Have you heard of parents hosting MEASLES PARTIES?
Seem pretty extreme right?
Well it turns out that’s pretty inaccurate.
Hey everyone!
Julia here for Dnews.
Lately there’s been so much buzz about “measles parties.”
The report seemed to originate out of Marin County, California - near San Francisco.
A mom told a local news station that another parent approached her with an idea.
Have a play date with another kid who has the measles.
This idea kicked off a media frenzy this month, with outlets like Fox, PBS, and others reporting
on it.
So why would someone deliberately infect their kid?
The idea of a measles party is to boost a kid’s immune system by intentionally exposing
them to a virus.
Parents wanting to avoid vaccines, make their healthy kids hang out with sick kids so that
they might catch it.
The idea is that the disease is something similar to chicken pox, mild but annoying.
Almost a rite of passage in childhood.
But the fact is, measles can be deadly.
Thankfully, there doesn’t seem to be credible evidence that measles parties are happening.
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) said they do not have any information
about measles parties.
But they “strongly recommend against the intentional exposure of children to measles,
as it unnecessarily places the exposed children at potentially grave risk and could contribute
to further spread of the outbreak.”
Pox parties on the other hand, were a real thing.
In the not too distant past, before the invention of a vaccine, kids got chicken pox.
a nasty itchy illness which triggers painful itchy blisters to appear on the skin.
I remember how horrible it was.
Taking oatmeal baths and rubbing embarrassing cream on my arms.
The itching was torture.
But it’s usually mild, and lasts only a few days.
Before the days of the chickenpox vaccine, pox parties became a thing.
Get infected with the virus as a kid, deal with it, and move on.
Getting the family sick at once might mean less time missed at school and work.
There were also rumors of a lollipop ring.
Parents would get their sick kids to lick a lollipop with the hopes that it would coat
it with the virus, then they would MAIL IT to someone so they would give it to THEIR
kid.
Now that some parents distrust vaccines, pox parties are popular again.
We might remember chicken pox as just an annoying blip in our childhood, yet before the chickenpox
vaccine became available there were 100 to 150 deaths from chickenpox among children
in the U.S. annually.
According to a study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases there’s even evidence
that kids who get chickenpox are four times as likely to have a stroke during the six
months following infection.
So the bottom line is if you want to boost your kids immune system safely, vaccinate
them.
Vaccines give a low dose or deactivated strain of a virus to allow your body to create antibodies
against it.
This way, when you come across an actual strain of the virus, your body can fight it off,
without any of the nasty side effects or complications.
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