Ministry of Health, Government of Kerala, announced that free anti-rabies vaccine will be provided to all dog-bite victims in the state. This generosity was triggered by the new intra-dermal vaccine that is far cheaper than the earlier intra-muscular one. Pledging solidarity with the Government's gesture, I will be offering Free Chickenpox immunization for anybody interested.

This is a very limited time offer, probably lasting another 2 or 3 days. If you have already had Chickenpox at some time in your life you don't need to immunize again. If you are an eligible candidate all you have to do is drop by my home and spend a couple of hours with me. Yes as simple as that, no injections, no pills. If you are lucky you will catch Chickenpox from me and immunize yourself from any future Chickenpox infections. :-)

I went down with Chickenpox just a couple of days after I came back from hospital after my dengue infection. It must have been that my body was very weakened by the dengue infection that made it easy for me to catch Chickenpox. I am happy that it is over, well almost. Supposedly I can still infect people until my sores are all healed which could be another day or two or worst case 3.

I had taken the antiviral drug Aciclovir the moment the pox marks were detected. The drug works wonders. I remember my sister going down with Chickenpox and being bedridden for almost 3 weeks. I was barely bedridden and I did not get the fever associated with Chickenpox. In fact I have been working all these days on a laptop and keeping track of office operations over phone. I was a tad tired, but that is not too bad compared to being bed-ridden. Because of the drug the sores also did not grow very large nor did they fester badly. The healing time was also drastically shorter than normal chickenpox.

Coming back to the Government's gesture, stray dog problem has been a bane across Kerala and nothing really has been done to cure the state of this menace. I had personally faced grave situations because of stray dogs during the Freedom Walk campaign. People have been complaining and newspapers have been campaigning but nothing really has been happening. Maybe our government has realized that it is cheaper and easier to give anti-rabies vaccine than to solve the stray dog problem in the state.