London - Picture the scene. A package falls through the letterbox. “Oh, darling,” your husband chides, “you haven’t been internet shopping again, have you?”
“Well, yes, sweetie,” you say. “But I know you won’t mind. You see, I’ve been spending our money on lollies licked by a stranger’s sick child, in order to help our own dear children catch a potentially fatal disease.”
Sound absurd? Well, not in the US, where an online business is selling lollipops that have been licked by children with chickenpox. So-called “Lollipox”.
Parents are snapping up these lollies at $50 (£31, or around R250) a piece. Their aim is to expose their young children to the chickenpox virus, because the disease can be more dangerous if caught in later life.
Alan Sugar will be gnashing his teeth that Wendy Werkit of Nashville, Tennessee, beat him to plugging this gap in the market. Showing mind-boggling entrepreneurial spirit, Werkit advertised on a Facebook page for parents trying to locate a local “pox party”, hosted by the parent of a sick child.
Parties like this are popular with some parents, who hope their children will emerge with a brief illness but a lifetime’s immunisation.
Presumably, guests play Ring-a-Roses (in homage to the Great Plague of London) before heading off with a party bag, a piece of cake and suppurating sores.
Now, though, Werkit has been reprimanded by the state courts, who have told her that sending viruses or diseases in the post is illegal.
I understand her customers’ fears, of course. A couple of my friends avoided chickenpox as children, only to end up catching it as adults, leading to a spell in hospital.
My oldest child was two when she caught it and got off with a couple of scabby and mildly uncomfortable days. My youngest, now four, has avoided it so far. If she’s going to be infected, I’d rather it happened sooner than later. Which is why, reminded by this lunacy, I’m going to whisk her to our local clinic as soon as possible to be privately vaccinated against the disease. It will cost around £75 - but I’d prefer to pay around £40 more for an injection in hygienic surroundings than buy spit-licked lollies online.
I wouldn’t dream of taking my children to a chickenpox party, nor a swine flu shindig, which were all the rage last year among the daft parents who, despite decent educations, consider vaccinations a sinister plot by big business to harm our immune systems and make us buy more drugs, rather than an attempt to save lives.
It’s one thing to accept that most children will catch the chickenpox virus in the playground; quite another to deliberately expose them to something that, even in young children, can be potentially lethal and cause terrible pain.
To me, “pox parties” and “Lollipox” are just another symptom of the “Me-Me-Me” mindset that affects so many mothers. You see them on buses hogging the wheelchair spaces with buggies the size of spaceships, and in restaurants where their children rampage. And now, it seems, in doctor’s surgeries, thrilled that their child has chickenpox, and to hell if they’re breathing germs over the other patients.
Sadly, the last thing they’re likely to catch from “Lollipox” is what they need most. A dose of common sense. - Daily Mail