Chicken Pox

What Is Chicken pox?

Among all the communicable diseases, chicken pox is one of the highly infectious diseases that make human suffer the most.

While chicken pox is the most common name, it is also termed as varicella in medical science. The disease is an acute one and is caused by the virus known as varicella-zoster or (V-Z).

Chicken pox is distributed in all parts of the world and its occurrence is common in both endemic and epidemic forms.

Nowadays, it is considered that chicken pox and herpes zoster are caused by the same etiological factor but with different host responses. Chicken pox is clinically characterized by vesicular type of rashes that are generally accompanied by fever and malaise.

Who Can Get Chicken pox?

The most common sufferers of the disease are children. The prodromal symptoms are usually mild.

However, in normal adults it can be severe.

Chicken pox occurs clinically in two stages; the pre-eruptive stage and the eruptive stage. In the pre-eruptive stage, fever and malaise are the usual signs and the eruptive stage is characterized by the eruption of rashes. The rashes advances through different stages like macule, papule, vesicle and scab. The rashes are usually superficial in nature having a dew drop like appearance.

The incubation period of chicken pox is generally 14 to 16 days.

How Do you Get Chicken pox?

Chicken pox is a highly contagious disease and mostly it is transmitted through personal contact. The infection spreads by droplet nuclei and droplet infection. The main route of entry of the varicella virus in the body is through the respiratory tract.

In pregnant mothers, the virus can easily harm the fetus by crossing the placental barrier giving rise to a condition termed as congenital varicella. In most of the cases, chicken pox is seen to be mild and self limiting type of disease. But occasionally the disease is accompanied by severe complications, especially, in the patients who have less immunity. However, complications are also seen in normal adults and children.

Some of the complications are encephalitis, pneumonia, hemorrhages, Reye’s syndrome and acute cerebeller ataxia. During pregnancy the maternal varicella may cause severe harm to the fetus leading to fetal wastage or can give rise to birth defects like atrophied limbs, microcephaly and low birth weight.

The manifestation of the chicken pox infection and its proper diagnosis is very important in clinical practice due to its resemblance with the characteristics of mild smallpox. Although the latter had been eradicated long before, there are some animal poxvirus (human monkey pox and tanapox) that have resemblance with that of mild smallpox. A few cases infected with these animal poxvirues have been reported in some parts of the world.

The most important points that differentiate smallpox virus from the chicken pox virus are that the nature of the rashes in the former is deep seated, umbilicated and multilocular while the rashes in chicken pox are superficial, unilocular and have a typical appearance of a dew drop. Also laboratory examination of the vesicle fluid under the microscope can rapidly differentiate between the two viruses. Although vaccines and immunoglobins are being used recently as preventive measures, chicken pox has no specific treatment. It can only be controlled by isolating the patient after appearance of the rash and disinfecting the articles soiled by the patients.