"We have all had chickenpox and nothing has happened to us," it is often said. And it is true in most cases because it is a disease that usually occurs in a benign way. However, this is not always the case because, as with many diseases, have complications that can be very serious.
As serious as affecting a child's immune system in such a way that any easily controllable disease becomes a problem that requires urgent medical attention, such as Anne Ganuza, a 3-year-old girl who has recently died from chickenpox virus.
It all started last Thursday, when Anne's mother took her to the health center of her town, La Puebla de Arganzón, where she was recommended rest for being a chickenpox. Instead of improving his state of health it was getting worse and worse, the result of a streptococcal infection secondary to chickenpox. The girl did not feel like eating, could hardly walk and had a high fever.
Seeing that the thing was getting worse, on Sunday they decided to take her to the Emergency Department in Vitoria, where doctors decided to discharge her at night, reportedly from the hospital, because at that time she had no fever, the beans were in phase of scab and there were no symptoms of any infection.
However, at six o'clock in the morning the girl began to convulse and the mother called 112. A series of terrible mistakes caused the ambulance not to be sent (the town where they reside is part of Trevino, which despite being in the country Vasco, is part of Castilla Y León, and they told him that the ambulance should come from there).
Seeing the problems that were there and that the process could be slow, the father returned from work to take the girl and transfer her to the hospital. The child entered unconscious, in a state of septic shock, and hospital staff tried to revive her for 45 minutes, without success.
What if the ambulance had arrived on time?
The ambulance was not sent from the Basque Country and although it is a bureaucratic error, this event is being talked about as the cause of death. However, with such an infection and seeing how quickly everything happened, the probability that Anne had survived was low. It goes down because the antibiotic treatment should have started much earlier, probably the night before, when he was discharged, or perhaps earlier. But you know, for that you need a diagnosis of infection that did not occur.
I do not mean by this now that chickenpox is a deadly disease, because as I say it is not in most cases, however we cannot leave it as a "banal disease", because in some cases, as you can see, it causes serious complications.
The AEP calculates that chickenpox causes more than 1,000 hospital admissions every year and between 5 to 6 deaths. Yes, they are very small compared to the number of children who take chickenpox and nothing happens to them, but there are 5 or 6 deaths that could be solved if the government paid attention to the vaccine schedule recommended by the AEP and contemplated the possibility of administering chickenpox vaccine to children of 12 months.
That the government says it is a benign disease and withdraws the vaccine? Well, they say, but they are not right. Anne's little sister, of course, She was vaccinated right away to keep her from getting chickenpox.
And all this I do not say either to try to convince anyone to vaccinate their children from chickenpox, since as I explain it is very likely that the girl would have been saved if she had suspected the bacterial infection and had been medicated to weather. I tell it so that it looks and knows that chickenpox can be complicated by very serious conditions, which require income and that, sometimes, medicine cannot solve.
