The article reports on a varicella endemic from May to June 1980 among 12 Ceylonese applicants seeking political asylum who had been assigned to a camp in Bremen. Whereas in Europe and in North America, chicken-pox are mainly an endemic disease among children, mass infections with varicella do occur among adults in the less developed and tropical countries. On account of the increasing inflow of foreigners and foreign workers from these areas, we are occasionally confronted by the clinical and immunological peculiarities of these ethnic groups. The course of the disease in the patients presented here was not substantially different from that among indigenous adult patients.

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case report chickenpox geographic distribution Varicella zoster virus diagnosis epidemiology