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June 7, 2002
U.S. IMMUNIZATION NEWS
"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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