A new study shows that children who do not get vaccinated are nine times more likely to develop chickenpox than those who do get the vaccination.

Parents often skip the vaccine for chicken pox, varicella, because they believe that chickenpox is not a serious health threat.  Researchers say that is wrong.  Prior to the vaccine being introduced in 1995, each year four million children contracted the disease.  Of those, over 10,000 were admitted to the hospital and 100 died as a result of the illness.

“The common perception among parents is that they don’t believe chickenpox is a serious illness, and they don’t believe their children are at risk,” said Jason Glanz of Kaiser Permanente’s Institute for Health Research in Denver, the lead author of the report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “This study shows that they are wrong on both counts.”

Chickenpox is a disease that causes an itchy rash and blister-like bumps on the skin.  While infected, children are more succeptable to get other ailments.  Chickenpox can also leave scars on the face and body.

Glanz and his team of researchers studied 87,000 children between the ages of one and eight.  They concluded that there is a one to four percent rate of “breakthrough” cases with vaccinated children, but those are usually mild in nature.

In years past, many parents would have “chickenpox parties”, where they would gather small children around an infected one in hopes that their child would contract the disease.  The logic behind these parties was that parents thought that chickenpox was not deadly when caught at a young age, as opposed to if they caught it as an adult.  The truth being, chickenpox can be deadly at any age.