Informative Speech: Breakthrough Varicella Vaccine

I would like to inform you that Chris will not be attending the next week of school. Chris has been showing signs of a fever and yesterday he had blisters all over his face, turns out he has chickenpox. But this isn’t the chickenpox we grew up with, this is a new, stronger strain known as breakthrough varicella. It is just as contagious as the chickenpox we experienced when we were children and it has the strength to overcome our children’s vaccinations. Over the past years many parents have decided that diseases such as shingles, mumps and chickenpox have been eradicated. In an effort to save money these parents did not vaccinate their children, making them vulnerable to these painful diseases. I’m sure you remember how contagious this virus is, especially to any unvaccinated students within the school. These students would face severe risk of catching the virus if my son attended school. As it is, no student is safe from this virus. The breakthrough varicella could start a school wide outbreak within a week. There is no cure to this disease and additional doses of the original vaccination have proven to
have no effect on this new virus. The only method of containment is isolation and I assure you that Christopher will stay home until this virus passes.
I know these methods work because I had a niece who had this disease and isolation proved to be the only cure.
She however, went to school with the virus and started a school wide outbreak. After five days the entire school was shut down and all students and staff, even those who were not infected, had to stay home for two weeks and not have any outside contact. The lack of contact destroyed the friendly connections in the school and set back classes. It was worse than spring break. Instead of coming back from an outdoor vacation the children came back from two weeks of playing video games and staying inside. Student athletes were out of shape and everyone was brain dead from the long break. The potential for this to become wide spread is also far too great. If our school had an outbreak it could easily be spread to other school and quickly cause an
epidemic.
This is not something I wish to see repeated, especially to our wonderful school systems of northern michigan. I will keep Christopher home until I am sure all of his blisters have scabbed over and he is safe to go to school. Thank you for your cooperation.