Aaron Jencks

MONDAY, June 10, 2019 (HealthDay News) — Shingles isn’t usually considered a kids’ disease, but children can get this painful condition. Fortunately, the chickenpox vaccine can also protect them against it, a new study finds. “The virus that causes chickenpox also causes shingles. It’s pretty uncommon in kids, but we wanted to see what would happen to the rates of shingles among children over time as more kids received the vaccine,” said study lead author Sheila Weinmann. She’s a senior investigator and epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente Northwest in Portland, Ore. What the researchers found was that kids who were vaccinated against chickenpox had a 78% lower risk of developing shingles. And the rate of shingles dropped in the entire group — vaccinated and unvaccinated — by 72% between 2003 and 2014. Weinmann said the overall drop was large because so much less of the virus was circulating in the general...