A little over a month ago, based on a story from the newspaper La Razón, we explained that the health minister, Alfonso Alonso, had reported that the chickenpox vaccine was going to return to pharmacies so that parents who wanted to could buy it and administer it to your children.
Yesterday the Ministry of Health made a statement in this regard explaining that the situation will not be exactly that, but much more favorable to the pockets of parents, and that is that it has been proposed to include the chickenpox vaccine in the state vaccine schedule, being finally free for all parents.
The proposal was carried out at the 63rd Congress of the Spanish Association of Pediatrics, held in Bilbao, where the minister intervened to explain that, after analyzing the current situation, it had been decided to include the vaccine in the calendar of all children in Spain and keep it at age 12 for those who have not passed the disease.
Is it necessary to vaccinate chickenpox?
Chickenpox, as many of you already know, is a very typical contagious disease of childhood (most of us have passed it as children), usually benign, caused by a virus called varicella-zoster, which we know to be the cause of plague the skin of lesions in the form of small blisters or vesicles.
The frequency of complications is not high, but neither can it be said to be minimal, since may appear in up to 15% of cases, the most common being vesicle infections when injured. Some of the complications may be more serious, with encephalitis, sepsis due to secondary infections, pneumonia, etc., although the risk is lower.
It is a disease that is very complicated the older the person who suffers it and therefore, to prevent an adult from becoming infected, for a few years it has been administered to adolescents when they turn 12. That is to say, yes, it is advisable to administer it to all 12-year-old boys and girls That they have not passed.
And if they are smaller? Well, it already goes a bit to opinions, but as we have said, it is a disease that is sometimes complicated. If we add to this that the child has to stay at home, that some parents have to miss work and that It is a dangerous disease in babies and pregnant womenIt seems interesting that the virus can be controlled at the population level with the vaccine, as has happened in Navarra, which have been vaccinating children for several years and are only seeing cases of chickenpox.
On the other hand, at the state level, it was found a few months ago that in a single year without the varicella vaccine in pharmacies the cases increased by 13%.
When will it become part of the calendar?
There is no date, we only have the words of the minister explaining the proposal of the Ministry that in an upcoming plenary session of the Interterritorial Council of the National Health System should be approved. Until the date is set, the possibility of replacing the vaccine in pharmacies for those parents who do not want to wait is contemplated, but as commented by the Spanish Society of Outpatient Pediatric Primary Care (SEPEAP) is not a measure that interests too much because neither is it interesting that parents pay for something that they will later receive for free. That is, they intend for everything to go relatively quickly (the question is: what is fast when we talk about bureaucracy?).
UPGRADE (07/29/2015): The Ministry of Health has announced today that the chickenpox vaccine will be part of the state vaccine schedule from 2016.
