Pregnancy and the Risks Posed by Chicken Pox
Most of us consider chicken pox a mild childhood disease that poses little or no harm to the sufferer. If you are a woman who is expecting a child and you have never contracted this disease, you may be posing certain risks to your unborn baby.
A typical scenario of days gone by were mothers having a “chicken pox party” where a child with chicken pox was exposed to other children of the neighborhood who had chicken pox, in order to get this pesky disease over with. Now we have vaccinations to prevent children from developing chicken pox and it may not always be a good thing.
What Having the Chicken Pox during Pregnancy may mean to Your Unborn Child
The risks that infected mothers pose to their unborn children during the first twenty weeks of pregnancy might include mental retardation, blindness, a head that is smaller in size than the norm, limbs that are malformed and scars on the skin. They may even suffer from defects to the bones and muscles.
When a woman contracts chicken pox during the final weeks of pregnancy, the risks to the unborn child increase substantially. The newborn may be at risk of developing a severe infection of the disease when they are born.
What to Do if You Fear Infection
Contacting your ob/gyn promptly is a must for an expectant mother who fears she has been infected with chicken pox. You will typically be given a vaccine that contains varicella-zoster immune globulin or VZIG. These are antibodies of the virus known as chicken pox. If an expectant mother is given this injection within seventy two hours following exposure, it may help to prevent her from contracting the disease or reduce the severity. It is still not known whether the VZIG injection prevents the unborn child from becoming infected but it is a safe solution that hurts neither the mother nor the child.
Filed under: Pregnancy Tests & Symptoms
