Chicken pox complications: Hyderabad doctors encounters rare case

By Syed Akbar
Hyderabad, June 23: Doctors at a city hospital encountered a very rare case of chicken pox complication affecting three vital body organ systems.
Chicken pox, normally a harmless health nuisance, turns life-threatening in the rarest of rare cases. A 14-year-old boy from Nanded in Maharashtra was brought to a city hospital with severe complications of chicken pox leading to failure of kidneys and problems in blood circulatory and nervous systems. The child was put on dialysis and has not recovered from the complications.
"Kidney failure requiring dialysis is very rarely encountered as a complication of chicken pox infection. Case reports are very few from across the world, and most pertain to older children and adults who generally succumb to the complications. The boy had involvement of three organ systems (the brain, the heart and blood vascular system and the kidneys)," says Dr VSV Prasad, consultant paediatrician at Lotus Hospitals.
A normally mild illness causing a rash and low grade fever, chicken pox or varicella infection in medical parlance, can cause deadly complications. Certain complications can be lethal due to this seemingly mild infection. Affecting mostly children in the age group of one to nine years, it passes off in the vast majority as an inconvenience and a few days of loss of schooling in most children, Dr Prasad said.
A vaccine is available to prevent this viral disease and should be offered to individuals who do not contract this infection in early childhood and those whose immune function is compromised, he suggested.