Chickenpox Vaccine Due Next Year
Children may get yet another shot when they go to the doctor next spring, as the government gets set to approve a vaccine to prevent that itchy rite of childhood called chickenpox.
And doctors are predicting a rush for the vaccine--not because parents know the disease kills about 90 people a year, but because they think it is such a nuisance.
“Some people have wondered if the gain is worth the cost of a vaccine for chickenpox,” said Samuel Katz, a pediatrician at Duke University Medical Center. “But parents are knocking on the door saying they want this vaccine.”
About 3.9 million Americans, mostly children, get chickenpox every year. Caused by the highly contagious varicella virus, it typically just causes severe itching and rash. But about 9,000 people develop complications ranging from blood infections to brain damage. An average of 92 died each year from 1987 to 1991. Children with weak immune systems and adults are most at risk.
Christopher Chinnes, 12, was one of those victims. The steroids the North Carolina boy was taking for a severe asthma attack suppressed his immune system, allowing chickenpox to shut down his organs one by one.
“It would have been kinder to shoot him in the head than the way he died,” said his mother, Rebecca Cole, who has lobbied for vaccine approval since Christopher’s death in 1988. “If we had had a vaccine, he would be here today.”
Cole’s lobbying may pay off soon. The Food and Drug Administration is in the final stages of investigating Varivax, a chickenpox vaccine developed by Merck & Co. An advisory committee is writing its conclusions now, and the FDA could approve the vaccine by spring.
Doctors predict Varivax will cut chickenpox to 240,000 cases a year with only four deaths. And a study sponsored by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found Varivax would cost $157 million a year but would save almost $700 million a year in medical bills and work lost by parents of sick children.
Japan and Europe have used a version of the vaccine successfully since the mid-1980s.
But its development here has been very slow. Doctors dislike giving healthy children a live vaccine for an illness that is usually mild. Others question whether it is needed when less than half the nation’s preschoolers are inoculated against more serious diseases like measles.
Merck has test vaccinated 11,000 people since 1981. Almost every child developed immunity; adults needed two doses. About 3% developed a few chickenpox lesions, and a few had fever and soreness, typical side effects of any vaccine.
