At school
Many children are probably already immunized, as some of them already suffer from chickenpox in kindergarten.Nevertheless, one is not allowed to go to school with a contagious disease. There are always a few children who have not yet been infected with the Varicella Zoster virus and you must never expose them to the risk of coming into contact with it. Therefore, it is important that the children should stay at home or, of course, you should go directly to the doctor with them to rule out other skin diseases and, if necessary, receive medication to alleviate the symptoms or, in the case of very immunocompromised children, medication to prevent the virus from spreading further.
How dangerous is shingles?
Shingles is usually not dangerous in children. It is usually much milder and causes much less pain and discomfort than in adult patients. Nevertheless, there are exceptions, just like everywhere else in medicine.
These exceptions can be children, for example, who have a congenital immune deficiency and whose immune system is therefore very weak. There are also diseases such as cancer, which require severe forms of therapy that also significantly weaken the immune system. An important example of a therapy that weakens the immune system significantly and sometimes severely is without doubt chemotherapy.
These children should be treated with great caution and they need a different therapy and even more supervision and control. A disease of chickenpox is caused by a certain strain of the herpes virus, the so-called varicella zoster virus. If this is treated adequately, the symptoms disappear after one to two weeks.
The special thing about all herpes viruses, however, is that they remain in the body of the person affected even after the initial infection has healed. In doing so, they hide in certain nerve cells and are inactive. This means that the immune system cannot fight these viruses.
After a long period of time, certain triggers can reactivate these Varicella zoster viruses. The consequence is the clinical picture of shingles. This is usually restricted to the nerve in whose cells the viruses had hidden while they were inactive.
This is the reason for the typical spreading pattern of shingles. So people cannot get shingles without having had chickenpox in their lives, because it must always precede shingles. For example, if a person with shingles infects another person who has never been infected with the virus, that person will develop chickenpox rather than shingles.
