Chickenpox: symptoms in children and adults
Chickenpox is not scary, but very unpleasant: itching, fever, green spots all over the body. Can this sore be avoided? Yes, if you get vaccinated on time.
The incubation period of chickenpox – as the people call chickenpox – is 21 days. Most often, signs of the disease appear 14 days after infection. To do this, it is not at all necessary to come into close contact with the sick person, it is enough just to be with him in the same space, since chickenpox is transmitted by airborne droplets.
The disease can be diagnosed by several signs at once: headache, joint aches, high fever and blistering rash – this is the main symptom of this disease and the most unpleasant one, since it is the rash that causes wild itching, and scratching of the bubbles, as a rule, leads to suppuration of the wounds.
Chickenpox is considered a childhood sore, because most people get sick with it before the age of 7 years. It is then that the disease is less difficult and does not bring with it practically any complications.
If a person falls ill with it in adulthood, various negative consequences are possible, so doctors recommend that everyone who did not have chickenpox in childhood get vaccinated after 14 years.
Blister disease treatment
The first thing to do with a sick person is to isolate him from healthy people for the entire period of the rash and for the next 5 days after the last crust has disappeared.
Treatment is usually carried out at home and is aimed at reducing the patient’s discomfort by lowering the temperature and eliminating itching. For the first, medications are taken, and for the second, ointments and solutions are used.
Brilliant green, salicylic alcohol, a solution of potassium permanganate and fucorcin, a preparation with a purple coloration are suitable.
If there are rashes near the mouth, you can use acyclovir, if in the mouth, then decoctions of chamomile and calendula will help.
The chickenpox vaccine appeared in 1974, which helped to significantly reduce the incidence of the disease in children and adults, because this disease is not so harmless.
Complications after chickenpox can include encephalitis, pneumonia, disfiguring scars on the skin of the body, pneumonitis, blood poisoning, and congenital chickenpox, which is diagnosed in 1 in 1000 adults and 1 in 10 children.
Vaccination against chickenpox is an effective way of forming immunity to this virus in 95% of vaccinated children under 5 years old, in 78% up to 13 years old. Therefore, WHO strongly recommends that the vaccine be injected twice for persons over 13 years of age.
In Russia, vaccination against chickenpox is not mandatory. It is made to anyone who wishes, starting from the age of 2, only since 2008. It makes no sense to vaccinate a person who has had chickenpox, since he has already developed lifelong immunity, but vaccination can be used as a preventive measure in case of contact with a patient, provided that the vaccine is administered within 72 hours. Then the infection can be avoided. In Russia, this practice is not widespread.
Whether it is worth getting vaccinated in our country, everyone decides for himself. However, if you remember the symptoms of the course of the infection, then you will see that this disease is quite capable of leading to negative consequences.
Take, for example, a pregnant woman who has never had chickenpox before. This infection can lead to early miscarriage or to the formation of congenital malformations in the fetus if the disease was transferred before the 20th week of gestation. And chickenpox in an expectant mother a week before giving birth can cause the development of congenital chickenpox in a baby.
In addition, the body becomes very weak after an illness and easily gives up before the attacks of colds, bronchitis, flu and other ailments, says Anna Timofeeva.