Word: chickenpox
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...increasingly, doctors have realized that varicella contains a variety of hidden threats. Among them: bacterial infections of the skin, pneumonia, encephalitis and the severe brain disorder known as Reye's syndrome. It can also be life-threatening to children taking immune-suppressing anticancer drugs. According to Government estimates, chickenpox-related illness leads to 100 deaths and 4,500 hospitalizations every year...
...healthy youngsters ranging in age from one to 14,468 were injected with the vaccine, while the rest received a placebo. Neither the researchers nor the children's families knew which drug was given. Nine months later, 39 of the youngsters who had received dummy shots had developed chickenpox. But no vaccinated child caught the disease. A few children getting the vaccine had pain, swelling and redness at the injection site and chickenpox-like rashes, but there were no long-lasting or serious adverse effects. The experimental vaccine was developed from a strain of varicella vi rus isolated...
...importance of a successful varicella vaccine goes beyond protecting children. Even those who recover uneventfully can be painfully reminded of the disease in adulthood by shingles. The chickenpox virus is a member of the herpes family of viruses that can lie dormant along nerves for decades and be suddenly reactivated, possibly by stress or injury. Says Virologist Stanley Plotkin of the University of Penn sylvania: "Shingles causes severe, insane pain in one in 10,000 Americans a year...
...Kenneth Mclntosh, a pediatrician at the Infectious Disease Laboratory of Boston's Children's Hospital, warns that before the Merck vaccine can be put to widespread use, "more years" of research are necessary to resolve such questions. Researchers also need to know how long the immunity to chickenpox will last...
...young children, wary of getting yet another shot, the news of the vac cine may not be welcome. But Merck says not to worry. It hopes to combine the chickenpox vaccine with a triple-threat shot already on the market that protects against measles, mumps and rubella. Possible cost of the new four-in-one vaccine...