![]() On the other hand, the existing chicken-pox vaccine, aimed at children, contains a whole, live, but weakened varicella zoster virus. This protein acts as an ID tag, allowing the immune system to recognize all future varicella zoster viruses it encounters. GlaxoSmithKline’s shingles vaccine contains a lone protein isolated from the shell of the varicella zoster virus. “It’s a real paradigm shift because there are no vaccines that perform so extraordinarily well for people in their 70s and their 80s.” The two diseases may arise from the same virus, but they afflict different populations and that is key: The immune systems of the elderly susceptible to shingles are different from the immune systems of children susceptible to chicken pox. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline to prevent shingles in adults age 50 and older, but not chicken pox. ![]() It’s a clever evolutionary gambit-you have to give it that. The reactivated virus can also find new human hosts, born after the last outbreak and vulnerable to chicken pox. Decades later, it can reawaken as shingles and infect skin cells along a single nerve, giving rise to the distinctive red stripe. It lurks inside neurons even after chicken-pox symptoms have cleared. The virus, it turns out, never quite leaves the human body. Scientists could finally see that the diseases were in fact caused by the same virus, the now awkwardly named “varicella zoster virus.” It was not until the the invention of powerful microscopes in the 20th century that the two became linked. This characteristic shape led ancient Greeks to call it “herpes zoster,” or roughly “creeping belt.” Shingles, on the other hand, usually affects adults, and its rashes often appear as an angry red stripe across one side of the torso. In the 18th century, a German doctor dubbed chicken pox “varicella,” a diminutive of his name for smallpox or “variola,” because chicken pox seemed to be its less severe form. It manifests as red bumps, eventually distributed over the whole body. ![]() They look so different.Ĭhicken pox usually strikes small children. For most of the time that humans have walked on Earth and scratched at itchy, red rashes, there was no reason to think chicken pox and shingles are related.
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