Anyone who has had chickenpox shares one distinct memory: the relentless, all-consuming itch.

Ciara DiVita was only 3 years old when she caught the virus, but she remembers it well—along with the oven mitts she was made to wear to stop herself scratching. She also recalls being taken to hang out with her cousin while covered in blisters, in the hopes of deliberately infecting them.

DiVita, now 30, was actually the second in the chain, having been taken by her parents to catch chickenpox from an infectious friend. “I imagine the chain continued and my cousin gave it to someone else at a chickenpox play date,” she says.

A lot has changed over the past three decades, most notably the development of a chickenpox vaccine, meaning the virus is no longer the childhood rite of passage it once was.

Thanks to the vaccine’s success, children today are much less likely to be exposed to the infection at school or on the playground.

Chickenpox parties are also largely considered a relic of the past—a strategy many Gen X and millennial children were subjected to before vaccines became routine. But much like the virus itself—latent, opportunistic—they haven’t disappeared entirely.

Before a vaccine existed, chickenpox, which is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, felt unavoidable. In temperate countries like the UK and the US, around 90 percent of children caught the virus before adolescence (in tropical countries the average age of infection is higher).

It’s nothing to do with chickens. The splotchy, scratchy, highly contagious disease is possibly named after the French word for chickpea, pois chiche, according to one theory, because the round bumps caused by the virus resemble their size and shape. While most infant cases are mild, adolescents and adults are more likely to develop severe complications.

This is where the idea of “getting it over and done with” emerged from, according to Maureen Tierney, associate dean of clinical research and public health at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

“You were trying to have your child get the disease when they were at the greatest chance of not having complications,” Tierney says, explaining that, generally speaking, the older the patient, the more severe the infection can be.

While varicella-zoster is usually a mild, self-limiting disease in children, it can be much more severe—and sometimes life-threatening—in adults.

“I had an otherwise healthy adult patient who died of chickenpox pneumonia when I was first practicing,” Tierney says. “You never forget those scenarios.”

The virus spreads rapidly through respiratory droplets and contact with fluid from its characteristic blisters, meaning if one child contracts it, siblings and classmates are likely to be next, if unvaccinated.

Before the existence of social media, the idea that children should deliberately infect each other spread just as rapidly around communities—in conversations in the school yard, church groups, and pediatric waiting rooms—leading to the popularity of so-called chickenpox parties.

Parents swapped advice about oatmeal baths and calamine lotion and arranged to bring children together when one was thought to be infectious—despite the practice never being an official medical recommendation.

“They thought, well, if it’s going to happen to my kid anyway, it might as well happen in a controlled environment,” says Monica Abdelnour, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. “The families were ready to encounter this infection, deal with it, and then move on.”

While the majority of children who develop chickenpox feel well again within a week or two, around three in every 1,000 infected experience a severe complication such as pneumonia, serious bacterial skin infections, encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), or meningitis.

In 1996, Guinea-Bissau seemed like an ideal research post for budding pediatrician Lone Graff Stensballe. Her supervisor, a fellow Dane named Peter Aaby, had spent nearly two decades collecting data on 100,000 people living in the mud brick homes of the West African country’s capital.

Aaby and his partner, Christine Stabell Benn, believed that the years of research in the impoverished country had yielded a major discovery about vaccines—and what they described as “non-specific effects”: The measles and tuberculosis vaccines, which were derived from live, weakened viruses and bacteria, they said, boosted child survival beyond protecting against those particular pathogens.

But, the scientists said, shots made from deactivated whole germs, or pieces of them, such as the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) shot, caused more deaths—especially in little girls—than getting no vaccine at all.

The World Health Organization repeatedly and inconclusively examined these astonishing findings. They tended to elicit shrugs from other global health researchers, who found Aaby’s research techniques unusual and his results generally impossible to replicate.

Then came Donald Trump, Covid, and the administrative reign of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Suddenly, Aaby and Benn weren’t just sending up distant smoke signals from a far corner of the planet. They were confidently voicing their views and policy prescriptions online and in medical journals. The “framework” for “testing, approving, and regulating vaccines needs to be updated to accommodate non-specific effects,” their team wrote in a 2023 review.

And the Trump administration has taken notice.

“They became more strident in saying that their findings were real and that the world needed to do something about it,” said Kathryn Edwards, a Vanderbilt University vaccinologist who has been aware of Aaby’s work since the 1990s. “And they became more aligned with RFK.”

Kennedy, as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, cited one of Aaby’s papers to justify slashing $2.6 billion in US support for Gavi, a global alliance of vaccination initiatives. The cut could result in 1.2 million preventable deaths over five years in the world’s poorest countries, the nonprofit agency has estimated. Kennedy has frozen $600 million in current Gavi funding over largely debunked vaccine safety claims.

Kennedy described the 2017 paper as a “landmark study” by “five highly regarded mainstream vaccine experts” that found that girls who received a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, or DTP, shot were 10 times more likely to die from all causes than unvaccinated children.

In fact, the study was far too small to confidently make such assertions, as Benn acknowledged. In a study of historical data that included 535 girls, four of those vaccinated against DTP in a three-month period of infancy died of unrelated causes, while one unvaccinated girl died during that period. A follow-up published by the same group in 2022 found that the DTP shot by itself had no effect on mortality. Critics say the 2017 study, rather than being a landmark, exemplified the troubling shortfalls they perceive in the Danish team’s research.

As Aaby and Benn’s US profile has risen, scientists in Denmark have set upon the work of their compatriots. In news and journal articles published over the past 18 months, Danish statisticians and infectious disease experts have said the duo’s methods were unorthodox, even shoddy, and were structured to support preconceived views. A national scientific board is investigating their work.

Stensballe, who worked with Aaby and Benn for 20 years, has been among those voicing doubts.

“It took years to see what I see clearly today, that there is a strange concerning pattern in their work,” Stensballe said in a phone interview from Copenhagen, where she treats children at Rigshospitalet, the city’s largest teaching hospital. She said their work is full of confirmation bias—favoring interpretations that fit their hypotheses.

In 2024, nearly all the service providers Gartner profiled in its Magic Quadrant for global WAN services report and the Magic Quadrant for managed network services report said they had started leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) in several ways to support the operation of enterprise networks. Areas of usage include AI for IT operations (AIOps), generative AI (GenAI) as a network assistant, enhanced service delivery, and AI in secure access service edge (SASE) and network security.

AIOps has emerged as a foundational capability in managed networking. Leading service providers, such as HCLTech, Microland and NTT Data, have begun to integrate AIOps capabilities and network automation for service onboarding and customer experience improvements. Also, service providers are deploying AI and/or machine learning (ML) to monitor network health, detect anomalies and automate routine tasks in network operations centres (NOCs).

The goal is to shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive assurance. For example, if latency on a wide-area network (WAN) link starts spiking intermittently, a machine learning model might recognise the pattern as a precursor to link failure and alert engineers or trigger failover before a major outage occurs.

One such service provider is Tata Communications, which has invested in AI-based fault diagnosis using AI/ML for 85% accuracy, while AI-driven telemetry predicts and addresses issues for proactive network monitoring.

Also, many network equipment suppliers now embed AI features to support service providers for network monitoring.