Chicken pox

Chicken pox, or to use its medical name varicella, is a highly infectious disease that can be found all over the world. It is caused by a virus from the herpes virus family, the varicella zoster virus.

Chicken pox is typically a childhood disease. There are very few children who do not catch this usually harmless but very unpleasant virus infection. This is revealed by blood tests that show that 90% of all adults have had chicken pox at least once in their life.

If you are infected by the virus for the first time in your life as an adult, the disease normally progresses much more severely than with children.