Nearly 30 years ago now, I had the extraordinary privilege to travel to Nova Scotia, Canada as part of an American Boy Scout troop that had been invited to participate in “ScotiaJamb”, a province-wide jamboree of Canadian scouts. Nearly 7,000 Scouts and Scouters from across many of the Maritime Provinces journeyed to the brand-new provincial park at Dollar Lake to partake in the inaugural festivities.


But about 3 weeks before the troop departed, my younger brother was diagnosed with varicella, or the chicken pox. I dutifully checked in with my doctor, who suggested that I was probably exposed, but in the dark ages of 1987…there was no vaccine for this disease. So, I rolled the dice and decided to travel with my troop.

We checked in to camp on a Sunday evening, and enjoyed the festivities and the first few days of the jamboree. But on Tuesday afternoon, I started feeling rather run-down, and I was sure I had a fever. Later that evening, I presented at the medical tent with an elevated temperature, general malaise, and the first visual evidence of the dreaded pox.

After that, time ceased to exist. My temperature skyrocketed, and I recall nothing from the next 24 hours. The doctors and staff in the medical tent were later to tell me that had my temperature reached 105, they actually had an RCAF helo on standby to whisk me to the hospital at Halifax, some 40 miles from the campground. The only thing I recall was being briefly lucid while an injured scout was screaming in the next bay…I told the nurse, “Bring him in here, and I’ll show him what pain is!”. Or at least that’s the way I remember it.

But overnight Wednesday into Thursday, my fever broke. Fortunately, the crisis receded as quickly as it came upon me, and the medical staff cautiously let me go to the lake to get in the water and cool off. I finally got to go back to my campsite on Friday, after being made an honourary member of the Medical Staff (I still have the patch), my Jamboree experience thoroughly ruined, but never forgotten to this day.

I was 21 years old when this all happened…I’ve read in the ensuing years that chicken pox tends to strike adults harder than children, and one of the many side effects is quite possibly infertility. I guess I could dramatize it somewhat….I almost died, and my life was changed, because the varicella vaccine simply didn’t exist when I had the disease.

But this was just the chicken pox; essentially a childhood disease, and a rite of passage for many of us when we were younger. Perhaps the author of "Melanie's Marvelous Measles" has the two diseases confused. Given their overall lack of intelligence, I wouldn't be surprised.

Measles is not to be trifled with. All of the information below was culled from our friends at Wikipedia....







That is all very ominous. I also learned today that the disease is actually incurable. Once you have it, all you can do is treat the symptoms and provide general palliative care - there is no "magic" drug that makes this go away, you can only treat the symptoms and hope the patient's own body can fight off the infection.



Think about that for a minute. If between 3 and 4 million people died every year in aviation accidents, or playing baseball, or from the common cold...these things would not exist in the United States, would they?

But of course there is something we can all do about it. At the proper time, all of us had little direct say over the matter, but it falls under the purview of "responsible parenting."



It just boggles my mind that this is even a debate.