"Chickenpox Strikes Twice More Often Than Thought"
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"Chickenpox Strikes
Twice More Often Than Thought"
Reuters Health
Information Services (www.reutershealth.com)
(06/06/02); McCook, Alison
A new report in the
journal Pediatrics indicates that many people do catch chickenpox a second
time. Up until now, one infection was generally thought to provide a person
with lifelong immunity to the disease, but researchers led by Susan Hall of the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that 13 percent of cases of
chickenpox reported in 1999 from a region of Los Angeles county occurred in
people who thought they had already had the disease before. According to two
authors of the study, Dr. Jane Seward of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and Dr. Aisha O. Jumaan of the Los Angeles County Department of
Health Services, many of these double cases might, in fact, involve infection
with a different virus that looks like chickenpox; Seward also said it could be,
in some cases, that the first infection did not completely immunize a person
against chickenpox. The study discusses two cases in which the patients
appeared to have developed chickenpox twice while young, with both illnesses
producing crusted lesions as in chickenpox and both could be directly linked to
exposure to other patients.
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