What is the difference between chicken pox and shingles?

What is the difference between chicken pox and shingles?

By Roberta

Many of you will have come across chicken pox before, it’s that spotty rash you get all over the body when you can’t resist the urge to scratch. It’s most often seen in children, especially within schools as it’s highly contagious, but can also affect adults that haven’t been exposed to it before. 

Shingles is also characterised by a blistery rash, but instead of simply being itchy and evenly spread throughout the body, it is quite painful and localised (in one area of the body). Furthermore, unlike chicken pox, it usually only affects adults above the age of 50.

However, it is no coincidence if these conditions seem similar; they are in fact caused by the same virus, the varicella zoster virus, but operate by different mechanisms. 

In chicken pox, the virus spreads through the body via blood vessels, starting with the face and upper body, causing its characteristic spotty blisters. This is often preceded by symptoms such as high temperature, fatigue, muscle or joint aches and cold-like symptoms. Normally, it takes about a week for the person affected to recover and the blisters to scab and fall off. Getting better however, doesn’t mean that our body is free from the virus, it simply means that we were able to control its spread. The varicella zoster virus in fact never leaves our body, it remains “asleep” or in more technical terms, dormant, inside of it. Specifically, it likes to hide and rest in the regions of the spinal cord where all our nerves branch out from: the spinal nerve roots.  The virus can remain there indefinitely without causing any troubles, but in some people, approximately 1 in 5, it can reactivate and cause shingles. The disease presentation in this case is different, it usually begins with tingling or itching of a patch of skin but without any other obvious symptoms. The rash only develops several days later, much later than in chicken pox, lasts up to 5 weeks, and continues to hurt even months after it’s healed! 

Unfortunately, whilst it’s very unlikely that you will get chicken pox twice in your life, it is possible for shingles to develop multiple times. This is because a lowered immune system (the cells in our body responsible for fighting against infections) can trigger the virus to reactivate and spread. Stress, illness and certain medications can cause this. 

Because of their unpleasant short and long terms symptoms, scientists have developed vaccines that can defend us against these two conditions and stop the virus from literally, setting roots in our body. There are 2 chickenpox vaccines currently available: VARIVAX and VARILRIX. A chicken pox vaccination have just become part of the routine NHS vaccination schedule and are available to those who are in close contact with vulnerable people, such as the elderly or those with a weakened immune system. The shingles vaccine on the other hand, is readily available on the NHS to everyone over the age of 70. In this case, the vaccine might not entirely reduce the risk of developing shingles, as the virus is already present in your body, but it’s likely that the symptoms may be milder and shorter than without it.