the.com/chickenpox
The itchy rite of passage your immune system never forgets, even decades later.
means A common, highly contagious viral infection (varicella) that causes an itchy, blistering rash, mostly in childhood.
from The 'chicken' part has puzzled etymologists for centuries — no one is certain why a fowl got blamed. Leading theories: the blisters resembled chickpeas, or were seen as a 'mild' pox compared to smallpox (with 'chicken' used the way we'd now say 'chicken-hearted,' meaning timid or weak), or the spots looked like they'd been pecked by a chicken's beak. 'Pox' itself comes from 'pocks,' the Old English plural of 'pock,' meaning a pustule or small sac — the same root behind smallpox. So the name is really 'pock-marks, but the chicken kind' — the exact joke just got lost along the way.
- virus behind it
- varicella-zoster, same family as herpes
- dormant danger
- can resurface as shingles decades later
- name origin
- unclear, maybe from chickpea-shaped blisters
- vaccine era
- routine shot since 1995 cut cases drastically