Shingles Disease

The Relationship Between Chicken Pox And Shingles

As you may be aware, chicken pox and shingles are caused by the same virus, Herpes Zoster.  While you cannot get chicken pox twice in a lifetime, a number of people will develop shingles.  In order to understand why chicken pox and shingles are considered two different illnesses, it is important to recognize how each disease starts and progresses.

Among other things, shingles is not simply a recurrence, or re-infection from external sources of Herpes Zoster.   Chicken pox, on the other hand, is a primary infection that must be transmitted from someone else.  This difference in origin is one of the main reasons why chicken pox and shingles are considered to be different diseases. 

 Someone with chicken pox is likely to experience cold-like symptoms, as the virus is also active in the lungs.  On the other hand, shingles is usually confined to the nervous system, skin, and sometimes internal organ linings.   You may think it strange that the same virus causes chicken pox and shingles, yet does not infect the same areas of the body.  Consider that after someone has recovered from chicken pox, the remaining virus particles are harbored by the nervous system.  Upon retriggering into shingles disease, they do not travel to the lungs because their main target is the skin.

In many illneses, such as the common cold, once your immune system has developed antibodies to a pathogen, you usually do not get sick from a reinfection.  For some reason, this is not the case with chicken pox and shingles.  In a sense, the capacity of Herpes Zoster to lie dormant in the nerve cells is similar to the way tuberculosis will  remain isolated in the lungs until something triggers it to start multiplying again. 

On the other hand, once someone has had the chicken pox, they are immune to external sources of the virus. As an example, someone that looks after a child with chicken pox will not develop a new outbreak of the illness.  Even stranger, resistance to shingles may be increased by being around people with active outbreaks of chicken pox and shingles. 

Modern research also indicates that chicken pox and shingles also react favorably to immunization strategies.  At some point, active outbreaks of shingles may be prevented with booster shots, much like tetanus and the flu.  That said, the inter-relationship between chicken pox and shingles may still offer a few surprises.   Among other things, the immune system seems to need to build the same kind of defense against  chicken pox and shingles.   On the other hand, if someone has had the chicken pox, they will not get reinfected with Herpes Zoster from an external source.