A pox on your party

I came of age when children still got childhood diseases.

Hand in hand with my sister Kath – we shared a bed until we were 6 and 8 years old – I had measles and German measles.

Measles really sucked, because we had it in the summer, when it was still light out in the evening, and we had to stay in our darkened bedroom with the blinds closed. Something about measles-related light exposure that could make you go blind. We could hear the loud-mouth Brennan boys marauding around next door, in their grandmother’s yard. No fairsy!

German measles wasn’t a trip to the beach, either.

Then we all – there were four of us at the time – got chicken pox. Our house was quarantined, and Kath had one of the worst cases the doctor had ever seen, with blisters on the insides of her mouth. Kath, I think, was 10 at the time. This was relatively old to have chicken pox, which may have accounted for the severity of her case.

None of us had official mumps, but those bouts of swollen glands may well have been mild mumps.

When I was in second grade, pretty much every one in my class came down with severe tonsillitis. This was a couple of weeks before our First Holy Communion was scheduled, and there was some fear that we would have to pick a new date. During the tonsillitis outbreak, there were some days when only 5 or 6 kids (out of 40+) were in class. Because of tonsillitis, I missed my grandmother’s 75th birthday party, but could hear it going on. (You can’t miss much in a small house with a lot of people in it.) My father’s cousin Matt stuck his head in the room to say hello to me; someone brought me a piece of cake, which was fruity and whipped creamy, and which came from a bakery. And which, despite the exotica of it being store-bought, I didn’t like very much. How can a birthday cake be anything other than chocolate?

In fifth grade, I came down with scarlet fever, which was kind of a scary thing, as it could damage your heart. No one else in the family got it, but I had to get a special note from the doctor before they’d let me back in school. The note came through in the middle of the morning, and I made my way in the cold and wind to school, thinking how odd it was to be out and about at 10:30 a.m. I felt pretty brave cutting through Bennett Field by myself – there were always rumors about creepy men in the wooded part of the cut-through at the back of the Field. (One time in Hixon’s Hollow, which bordered Bennett Field, and sounds like something out of Appalachia, not Worcester Mass, a creepy old man did throw burrs at me and my friend Bernadette. We just ran away and didn’t tell anyone.) I did make it safely to Our Lady of the Angels, where, for the remainder of the day, everyone looked at me like I was a cootie-carrying freak.

And then there was the scourge of polio, which hovered over my early childhood.

The vaccine became available in the mid-fifties, and when I was in first grade everyone got their polio shots at school. You had to bring in a signed permission card to give to Mrs. Haggerty, the school nurse, but I don’t remember anyone’s parents refusing to get their kids inoculated.

Polio was just too terrible.

It was not uncommon to see kids limping around wearing leg braces, sometimes with arm-brace canes, as well. One girl in my class, Patty G, wore a leg brace, I believe up until junior high. We all heard about cases where kids lived in iron lungs.

The man across the street – a young father of two small boys – survived Korea but died from polio.

Who would refuse having their kid immunized?

Fast forward a lightning quick half-century or so, and kids don’t so much get childhood diseases anymore, thanks to immunizations against a lot more than polio.

But getting vaccinated is not without controversy.

Some people believe that the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (German Measles) – MMR vaccination is linked to autism. 

Others believe that having the MMR or the more recent chickenpox vaccination will produce weaker children/adults, and want their kids to be exposed to these diseases so that they become hardier.

Indeed, I remember people (pre-vaccine) deliberately exposing their kids to chickenpox so they’d get it over with at a younger/safer age.

And now, as I read in Anahad O’Connor’s blog on The New York Times, some parents are moving beyond Pox Parties, and are selling poxy lollipops and:

…a variety of chickenpox-infected items – towels, children’s clothes, rags. By getting their children to touch the contaminated items or suck on tainted candy, they 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.

Yowza!

If this doesn’t sound like blue-eyed devils giving Native Americans small-pox infected blankets, I don’t know what does.

In my mind, letting your three year old hang out with a chickenpoxy buddy is one thing. FedEx-ing germy kids clothing is quite another. Sounds positively medieval – the infected rags, not the FedEx-ing.

Needless to say, public health officials aren’t enamored of this idea:

“I think it’s an incredibly bad idea, whether you’re getting it from a lollipop or somewhere else,” said Dr. Rafael Harpaz, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “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 United States attorney in Nashville, where the tainted lollipops were advertised at $50 for overnight delivery, issued a warning last week that sending infected items “through the flow of commerce” was a federal crime, punishable by up to 20 years in jail.

I wouldn’t want to be the mail carrier, UPS guy, or FedEx driver delivering the goods if the box ripped open.

Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from their appointed rounds, but who wants to end up with shingles because some Concerned Mom ordered a chicken pox lollipop that they got stuck delivering.

And if public health officials, and delivery folks,  aren’t enamored of interstate commerce in infected lollipops, neither are those (majority of) parents who want to get their kids immunized, and resent the fact that the non-immunized kids may spread disease to their little ones before their kids reach the recommended immunization age.  Not everyone is going to appreciate it if you send your little Typhoid Mary off to day care

Information on infection-related goods (pox-pops) and services (par-tay!) spread, quite naturally, through social media. And, like any infection worth its salt, there’s no way to stop it.

Meanwhile, the controversy rages on.

Not everyone out there thinks pox pop is the same as vox dei.