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Quoted from wikipedia!

Chickenpox is a highly contagious illness caused by primary infection with varicella zoster virus (VZV). It generally begins with spots appearing in two or three waves, mainly on the body and head rather than the hands and becoming itchy raw pockmarks, small open sores which heal mostly without scarring.

Do you know that there is a vaccine for chickenpox? I just got the shot for the prevention of it few weeks back before visiting my dear Wendy.

Yes, you may say that I’m too coward to get chickenpox at my age now. Ehmmm, maybe I’m just buying myself an insurance for few years before I’m prone to infection again.

Come and think of it, It’s actually good to get infected as we will get (almost) lifelong immunity to the virus. Although there’s still few rare cases where people get infected again after they got infected already.

The shot I got few weeks back is called as Okavax. It’s developed by The Research Foundation for Microbial Diseases of Osaka University (BIKEN).

You can read more about Okavax vaccine in this pdf file. I wish to quote some text from the pdf file. It writes…

Clinical studies have established the safety and efficacy of this vaccine in both healthy persons and high risk patients.3)-23) Seroconversion rate is about 90% and the protection rate in household contacts is about 80% among leukemia children. Seroconvention rate in other recipients is more than 90% and about 10% of recipients are susceptible to chickenpox. The symptoms of the vaccine recipients after infected n0atural chickenpox are generally mild. In leukemia patients under maintenance therapy, it is recommended that immunity against chickenpox be monitored 1 to 3 months after vaccinations and periodically thereafter, and that the vaccine should be re-injected depending on the condition of the patient when decreases in the antibody titer are significant.

So, if I’m interpreting this correctly, there is still some risk of getting infected by chickenpox virus even after the vaccine shot. I think I saw somewhere in the web that we will be better protected if we take two shots of the vaccine. I’ll post it up the source if I come across it again!

Oh yes, just seconds before I hitting the publish button…. read here for more! Highly informative!

Guys, time to get protected! :D

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