Mom Shares Gut-Wrenching Photos of Child's Chicken Pox, Warns Parents To Vaccinate
Indulge me, Liftable readers, because I want to recount a little family health history. If you’ll remain patient, I promise that it applies to our topic today.
My father passed away from a malignant brain tumor, one of those terrible diseases you’d never wish on your worst enemy. But despite suffering from that awful illness, he’d otherwise lived an almost entirely healthy life.
Heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma — he’d avoided all of them. And do you know what else he’d avoided? Chicken pox, that scourge of childhood.
Kayley Burke of Brisbane, Australia, wished that her children could’ve also not contracted the varicella virus. In June 2016, she penned a Facebook post describing the plight of her youngest child, then-11-month-old Elijah.
“Our poor baby boy, who is too young to be immunized, has caught the chicken pox” she wrote. “It has almost been a week since they showed up.”
The pictures that accompanied the post were stomach turning. They showed a fat-cheeked baby with a pacifier in his mouth who seemed to be sleeping.
Yet where most chubby infants would have a certain glow about them, young Elijah’s flesh was scored by terrible scabs. These weren’t the tiny, red dots that spring to mind when most of us think about chicken pox.
The following pictures may be disturbing to some readers.
Rather, these were crusted craters, many about the size of a penny. They clustered around the child’s nose, mouth, and eyes, then splayed across his forehead.
Elijah’s case was so bad that he had to be admitted to the hospital. And his suffering didn’t stop there.
Doctor’s diagnosed the baby with a secondary infection, and Elijah had to stay in the hospital for a week. His plight angered Burke, especially because of the effectiveness of the chicken pox vaccine.
“Vaccinate your kids, people,” she wrote. “Think about the risk you are putting on other helpless kids that are too young or who actually can’t be vaccinated!”
Pundit Katie Tietje (aka Modern Alternative Mama) objected to Burke’s call to action, citing concerns about the vaccine itself. In a piece entitled “Chicken Pox is Not Dangerous or Scary,” she wrote that Elijah’s “reaction is really quite rare.”
Perhaps, but it may not be as rare as Tietje maintained. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has discovered that anywhere from two to four percent of chicken pox cases seen by a family physician have complications.
Some of them make Elijah’s case seem downright benign. Complications have included lung issues, neurological issues, and serious infections.
Deaths have even been reported. Now, parents need to make up their own minds about whether or not vaccines are appropriate for their families.
Still, the CDC reports that most side effects from the chicken pox vaccine include soreness, fevers, a rash, or joint pain. Given such relatively mild downsides, it’s worth giving this vaccine a second look if it can alleviate such suffering as the Burke family experienced.
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