Anti-vacciners inoculate children the old-fashioned way. How could this possibly go wrong?
PHOENIX (KPHO) -
Doctors and medical experts are concerned about a new trend taking place on Facebook. Parents are trading live viruses through the mail in order to infect their children.
The Facebook group is called "Find a Pox Party in Your Area." According to the group's page, it is geared toward "parents who want their children to obtain natural immunity for the chicken pox."
On the page, parents post where they live and ask if anyone with a child who has the chicken pox would be willing to send saliva, infected lollipops or clothing through the mail.
Parents also use the page to set up play dates with children who currently have chicken pox.
Medical experts say the most troubling part of this is parents are taking pathogens from complete strangers and deliberately infecting their children.
One concern is that they are sending the virus through the mail.
A Facebook post reads, "I got a Pox Package in mail just moments ago. I have two lollipops and a wet rag and spit." Another woman warns, "This is a federal offense to intentionally mail a contagion."
Another woman answers, "Tuck it inside a zip lock baggy and then put the baggy in the envelope :) Don't put anything identifying it as pox."
"This is dangerous", said Dr. A.D. Jacobson, the chief of ambulatory pediatrics at Phoenix Children's Hospital. He said chicken pox is extremely contagious and is something he would never recommend you send in the mail.
Children can encounter complications like encephalitis and skin infections when they're introduced to the disease.
In rare cases children can die from not getting vaccinated. Dr. Jacobson said that he had a child in the hospital that died at 14 months due to chicken pox pneumonia.
"If you have a young child over to your house specifically to get chicken pox, I don't think anyone would like to really consider what would happen if that child ended up being hospitalized," said Elizabeth Jacobs from the University of Arizona College of Public Health.
CBS 5 producers found others asking for more dangerous pathogens. Two people on the Facebook page were looking for measles, mumps, and rubella.
Jacobs said, "I could never feel good about purposely infecting a child with a disease like that."
According to the Facebook page, parents sent contaminated material from Arizona to California, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, and Canada.
Copyright 2011 KPHO. All rights reserved.
Paige Gruner contributed to this report.
Chickenpox parties--just a Facebook friend away
Category: General Epidemiology • Infectious disease • Public health • Vaccines • Various viruses • wtf?
Posted on: November 4, 2011 1:20 PM, by Tara C. Smith
I've written a few times about chickenpox parties. The first link refers to a magazine article describing the practice; the second, a few years later, about a Craigslist ad looking to hold such a party "at McDonald [sic] or some place with toys to play on."
Clearly, as chickenpox cases have become more rare in recent decades due to the success of the chickenpox vaccine, moving toward social media to find infections is the way to go. It allows people to find such cases and expose their immunologically naive children to a serious virus, just as easily as googling Jenny McCarthy Body Count." But now, it's gone even farther, with parents on this Facebook page hooking up to not only find cases/parties, but also to ship contaminated samples through the mail:
Shipping any kind of microbial specimen is a huge pain in the rear, specifically because they have the potential to cause harm. Myself and any employees who do this shipping have to be specially trained, and we have to use a number of specialized shipping containers to mail samples, and take precautions to prevent any leakage etc. out of the packages. Yale has a nice overview of shipping specimens at the link--54 pages long. We also have to apply for permits to ship many of these organisms. Now, Varicella zoster (chickenpox) isn't on their list as far as "select agents," but secretions from a person thought to have or diagnosed with chickenpox would be considered a category B agent (moderate risk of harm):
Biological substances, such as diagnostic or clinical specimens from humans or animals that are known to harbor a pathogen or have a high probability of containing a pathogen.
How should you package these?
Triple packaging. Must pass a 1.8 meter or 4 foot drop test. Packages shipped by air must meet a 95 kPa or 14 psi pressure test of primary or secondary container.
You can see pages 10-11 of the pdf for more instructions. This isn't as easy-peasy as "stick it in a Ziploc baggie." These people are putting a dangerous substance in the mail with the possibility (remote, but there) of making people sick. What if your mail carrier had never had the chickenpox or the vaccine? What if s/he is immunocompromised in some way? These people are taking all the dangers of their "chickenpox parties" and putting them in the mail system. Thank you, Andrew Wakefield and Barbara Loe Fisher.
Now, to be generous, their information page has been changed since the story came out to note "ABSOLUTELY NO SENDING VIRUSES THROUGH THE MAIL. This will not be tolerated and will be deleted immediately. Local only." However, c'mon--people still have messaging on Facebook and I doubt that's really going to stop the determined ones. These people simply don't care about anyone but themselves and are in denial about the fact that chickenpox can kill--the one woman who received samples didn't even know the name of the person they were from. This is so many levels of irresponsible I don't even know where to begin.
Finally, not surprisingly, they're deleting any comments that run counter to their propaganda. I replied to a few comments noting that the link between chickenpox and subsequent Streptococcal infection, for example, and it was gone within 20 minutes. I also noted that both my grandmother (shingles which led to pneumonia) and an uncle I never knew (primary chickenpox followed by pneumonia when he was only a year old) died from Varicella infection. The virus isn't a joke, and those of us who had it, like me, are at a much higher risk of developing complications via reactivation (such as shingles) than those who obtained immunity via the vaccine. I wish the vaccine had been available when I was a kid, and I am frustrated as hell that these types of "parties" still exist in the vaccine era.
Source 1/Source 2
Doctors and medical experts are concerned about a new trend taking place on Facebook. Parents are trading live viruses through the mail in order to infect their children.
The Facebook group is called "Find a Pox Party in Your Area." According to the group's page, it is geared toward "parents who want their children to obtain natural immunity for the chicken pox."
On the page, parents post where they live and ask if anyone with a child who has the chicken pox would be willing to send saliva, infected lollipops or clothing through the mail.
Parents also use the page to set up play dates with children who currently have chicken pox.
Medical experts say the most troubling part of this is parents are taking pathogens from complete strangers and deliberately infecting their children.
One concern is that they are sending the virus through the mail.
A Facebook post reads, "I got a Pox Package in mail just moments ago. I have two lollipops and a wet rag and spit." Another woman warns, "This is a federal offense to intentionally mail a contagion."
Another woman answers, "Tuck it inside a zip lock baggy and then put the baggy in the envelope :) Don't put anything identifying it as pox."
"This is dangerous", said Dr. A.D. Jacobson, the chief of ambulatory pediatrics at Phoenix Children's Hospital. He said chicken pox is extremely contagious and is something he would never recommend you send in the mail.
Children can encounter complications like encephalitis and skin infections when they're introduced to the disease.
In rare cases children can die from not getting vaccinated. Dr. Jacobson said that he had a child in the hospital that died at 14 months due to chicken pox pneumonia.
"If you have a young child over to your house specifically to get chicken pox, I don't think anyone would like to really consider what would happen if that child ended up being hospitalized," said Elizabeth Jacobs from the University of Arizona College of Public Health.
CBS 5 producers found others asking for more dangerous pathogens. Two people on the Facebook page were looking for measles, mumps, and rubella.
Jacobs said, "I could never feel good about purposely infecting a child with a disease like that."
According to the Facebook page, parents sent contaminated material from Arizona to California, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, and Canada.
Copyright 2011 KPHO. All rights reserved.
Paige Gruner contributed to this report.
Chickenpox parties--just a Facebook friend away
Category: General Epidemiology • Infectious disease • Public health • Vaccines • Various viruses • wtf?
Posted on: November 4, 2011 1:20 PM, by Tara C. Smith
I've written a few times about chickenpox parties. The first link refers to a magazine article describing the practice; the second, a few years later, about a Craigslist ad looking to hold such a party "at McDonald [sic] or some place with toys to play on."
Clearly, as chickenpox cases have become more rare in recent decades due to the success of the chickenpox vaccine, moving toward social media to find infections is the way to go. It allows people to find such cases and expose their immunologically naive children to a serious virus, just as easily as googling Jenny McCarthy Body Count." But now, it's gone even farther, with parents on this Facebook page hooking up to not only find cases/parties, but also to ship contaminated samples through the mail:
Shipping any kind of microbial specimen is a huge pain in the rear, specifically because they have the potential to cause harm. Myself and any employees who do this shipping have to be specially trained, and we have to use a number of specialized shipping containers to mail samples, and take precautions to prevent any leakage etc. out of the packages. Yale has a nice overview of shipping specimens at the link--54 pages long. We also have to apply for permits to ship many of these organisms. Now, Varicella zoster (chickenpox) isn't on their list as far as "select agents," but secretions from a person thought to have or diagnosed with chickenpox would be considered a category B agent (moderate risk of harm):
Biological substances, such as diagnostic or clinical specimens from humans or animals that are known to harbor a pathogen or have a high probability of containing a pathogen.
How should you package these?
Triple packaging. Must pass a 1.8 meter or 4 foot drop test. Packages shipped by air must meet a 95 kPa or 14 psi pressure test of primary or secondary container.
You can see pages 10-11 of the pdf for more instructions. This isn't as easy-peasy as "stick it in a Ziploc baggie." These people are putting a dangerous substance in the mail with the possibility (remote, but there) of making people sick. What if your mail carrier had never had the chickenpox or the vaccine? What if s/he is immunocompromised in some way? These people are taking all the dangers of their "chickenpox parties" and putting them in the mail system. Thank you, Andrew Wakefield and Barbara Loe Fisher.
Now, to be generous, their information page has been changed since the story came out to note "ABSOLUTELY NO SENDING VIRUSES THROUGH THE MAIL. This will not be tolerated and will be deleted immediately. Local only." However, c'mon--people still have messaging on Facebook and I doubt that's really going to stop the determined ones. These people simply don't care about anyone but themselves and are in denial about the fact that chickenpox can kill--the one woman who received samples didn't even know the name of the person they were from. This is so many levels of irresponsible I don't even know where to begin.
Finally, not surprisingly, they're deleting any comments that run counter to their propaganda. I replied to a few comments noting that the link between chickenpox and subsequent Streptococcal infection, for example, and it was gone within 20 minutes. I also noted that both my grandmother (shingles which led to pneumonia) and an uncle I never knew (primary chickenpox followed by pneumonia when he was only a year old) died from Varicella infection. The virus isn't a joke, and those of us who had it, like me, are at a much higher risk of developing complications via reactivation (such as shingles) than those who obtained immunity via the vaccine. I wish the vaccine had been available when I was a kid, and I am frustrated as hell that these types of "parties" still exist in the vaccine era.
Source 1/Source 2