You Think You Had a Measles Party as a Kid. You Didn’t.

With measles making headlines again, a lot of Massachusetts parents and grandparents have been saying some version of the same thing: "Oh, we used to just have measles parties and get it over with."

I have heard a few podcasters reminisce about "measles parties", in fact, what they meant was chickenpox parties.

Here is the thing. You almost certainly did not go to a measles party. You went to a chickenpox party. And there is a good reason for the mix-up.
By the time most people alive today were kids, measles was already largely under control.

(Note: measles parties were a thing in the 1950's)

A vaccine for measles became available in 1963, and by the 1970s, widespread measles exposure among children was becoming rare. What was still very much alive, itchy, spotted, and spreading through every elementary school in America, was chickenpox. -who.int

Before the chickenpox vaccine arrived in 1995, roughly four million Americans got chickenpox every year. It was so common that parents genuinely believed their kids would catch it no matter what, so many decided to just get it over with early, when the illness tends to be milder than it is in adults. They would send their kids to play with a neighbor's spotted child, or host a house full of kids around a sick one. It was not a party in any festive sense. It was a strategy.

That strategy, it turns out, was not as smart as it seemed. Before the vaccine, chickenpox was sending between 10,000 and 18,000 Americans to the hospital every year and killing 100 to 150 people annually, most of them children. It also left the virus dormant in the body, where it can reactivate decades later as shingles.

Measles, meanwhile, is a different beast entirely. It is far more contagious than chickenpox and far more dangerous. Roughly 30% of measles cases can lead to serious complications including pneumonia, brain swelling, and permanent damage.

So no, you probably did not survive a measles party. But you may well have survived a chickenpox party.