Whoever has Chicken pox had a distinct memory: unrelenting, all-out itching.

Ciara DiVita was just 3 years old when she caught the virus, but she remembers it well — along with the oven mitts she was made to wear to keep from scratching herself. She also recalls being taken to hang out with her cousin, covered in blisters, in the hope of deliberately infecting her.

DiVita, now 30, was actually the second in the chain, taken by her parents to catch chicken pox from an infected friend. “I imagine it’s been passed down and my cousin gave it to someone else on a history of having chicken pox,” she says.

Much has changed in the past three decades, particularly the development of the chickenpox vaccine, meaning the virus is no longer the childhood rite of passage it once was.

Thanks to the success of vaccines, children today are much less likely to contract an infection at school or on the playground.

Chickenpox parties are also widely considered a relic of the past — a tactic that targeted many Gen X and millennial kids before vaccines became the norm. But like the virus itself — latent, opportunistic — they haven’t completely disappeared.

Before the vaccine was present, chickenpox, caused by the varicella-zoster virus, felt inevitable. In temperate countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, About 90 percent Among young people, the virus was caught before puberty (average age of infection in tropical countries). high).

It has nothing to do with chickens. The spotty, itchy, highly contagious disease is likely named after the French word for chickpea, Pois Chiche, According to one theoryBecause the round bumps caused by the virus are similar in shape and size. Although most neonatal cases are mild, adolescents and adults are more likely to develop severe complications.

According to Maureen Tierney, associate dean of clinical research and public health at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, that’s where the idea to “get over it and be done with it” emerged.

“You’re trying to get your child to have the disease when they’re most likely to not have complications,” says Tierney, adding that, in general, the older the patient, the more severe the infection can be.

Although varicella zoster is usually a mild, self-limiting disease in children, it can be very severe and sometimes fatal in adults.

“I had a healthy adult patient die from chicken pox pneumonia when I was first practicing,” Tierney says. “You’ll never forget those scenarios.”

The virus spreads rapidly through respiratory droplets and contact with fluid from characteristic blisters, meaning that if one child contracts it, siblings and classmates are likely to be next, if not vaccinated.

Before the existence of social media, the idea that children should intentionally influence each other spread around communities just as quickly—in schoolyards, church groups, and children’s waiting room conversations—which led to the so-called popularity of chicken pox parties.

Parents swapped advice on oatmeal baths and calamine lotion and arranged to bring children together when someone was thought to be contagious—despite the practice never being an official medical recommendation.

“They thought, well, if this is going to happen to my child, it might as well happen in a controlled environment,” says Monica Abdelnor, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. “Families were ready to face the infection, deal with it and then move on.”

Although the majority of children who develop chickenpox feel well again within a week or two, about three in every 1,000 infected will develop a serious complication such as pneumonia, serious bacterial skin infection, encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) or meningitis.