On November 14, the U.K. government announced that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) had recommended a vaccine against chickenpox (varicella) should be added to routine childhood immunisation programme.
- The vaccine is to be offered to all children in two doses, at 12 and 18 months of age.
- JCVI’s recommendation comes nearly three decades after the U.S. introduced it in 1996, and a body of evidence emphasising the benefits of varicella vaccination.
- While chickenpox in children is most often relatively mild, some can develop complications, including bacterial infections, and in rare cases can cause encephalitis, lung inflammation, and even stroke; it can also rarely cause deaths.
- Even when the disease clears, the virus stays dormant in the body and can get reactivated to cause herpes zoster (shingles), especially in adults.
- Exposure to the virus through children with chickenpox was expected to boost the immunity in adults and thus reduce the risk of shingles.
- It was theorised that vaccination of children will lead to loss of natural immunity boosting in adults, thus leading to significant increase in shingles cases.
- This was one of the reasons why routine administration of the vaccine in children did not begin in the U.K. earlier.
Varicella (chickenpox)
- Varicella (chickenpox) is an acute infectious disease. It is caused by varicella-zoster virus (VZV), which is a DNA virus that is a member of the herpesvirus group.
- After the primary infection, VZV stays in the body (in the sensory nerve ganglia) as a latent infection. Primary infection with VZV causes varicella
