Parents hosting 'Chicken Pox Parties' to get kids sick instead of vaccinating them

A new trend has emerged whereby parents are organizing ‘Pox Parties’ to expose their children to kids who have the virus.

A report from Boulder, Colorado in the US reveals that parents are using private Facebook groups to intentionally ‘share’ chicken pox.

One mother with a sick child wrote that she has “been swamped with requests” and that she “can accommodate as many requests as possible,” providing specific timeframes.

The ‘Pox Parties’ advise encouraging healthy children to share a tent-like space with an infected child in order to maximise chances of the disease spreading.

However, experts are condemning the practice, urging parents to vaccinate their children instead of exposing them to the infection -- or face some serious health risks.

“There’s this emphasis on natural immunity being better than vaccine-delivered immunity. So, the idea [is] that you would get your child chickenpox, and that would give them this sort of life-long immunity,” Dr Lindsay Diamond told 9News. Dr Diamond has a doctorate in molecular biology.

“But you can achieve the same thing, or close to, with the vaccine without serious risks.

“This is all focused on your child, but in reality this is a community issue. And so these people then go out into their world.

“They go to the library, they go to the grocery store, they go to schools where there’s likely to be an immunocompromised person. And then you are risking the health of not only your own child, but the public health,” Diamond said.

According to the Better Health channel, when enough people in the community are vaccinated, the spread of a disease slows down or stops completely.

So as long as enough people are vaccinated, diseases such as chickenpox will not spread – otherwise known as herd immunity.

Immunised children who get chickenpox (known as breakthrough chickenpox) generally have a much milder form of the disease. They have fewer skin lesions, a lower fever and recover more quickly.