Good question. Shingles is caused by the virus that causes chickenpox (herpes zoster). If you get chickenpox, the virus can hide in your body for decades, then give you shingles. If you never get chickenpox, you won't get shingles.

It's possible to get chickenpox even after getting a vaccine, but the disease is usually a lot more mild. If you live in an area where almost everyone gets the vaccine, you may never get chickenpox.

The good news is that shingles usually only affects people over 60. Our immune systems get weaker as we get older. This can allow the virus to become active again. A person could also get shingles if their immune system was weakened by other diseases or certain drugs. Other good news is that there is a vaccine for shingles. Since you're still in your early teens, we may well have more effective prevention and treatment for shingles by the time you would have to worry about it.

Your vaccine helps other people in your community who may be too young to get vaccinated or who have allergies or other health problems that mean they can't get vaccinated. This is called "herd immunity." If enough people can't get sick, this can stop a virus from spreading.

Do you think healthy children should have to be vaccinated before they're allowed to attend school? This question can't just be answered using science. You will have to think about the rights of individuals and the safety of the community.

Chickenpox is caused by the varicella zoster virus. Upon infection, the virus will spread in the blood stream. This is called viremia, the presence of virus in the blood. The blood stream will carry the virus around the body. The virus will settle in the nerves of the host. In fact, almost all patients recovered from a chickenpox infection have the virus in their trigeminal ganglia, the two clusters of nerves behinds each of your check bone, throughout their lives. They have those little friends with them forever!

This is somewhat beneficial as the virus replicates in small numbers and reinforces the immune system's memory. If the immune system holds up, this provides people life-long immunity to the virus. However, in some cases, the immune system fails to suppress the virus and this leads to shingles. This happens in older people as their immune system is not as strong as it was. Shingles manifest as painful blisters in a strip of skin. It turned out that the particular strip of skin, a dermatome, is supplied by a particular nerve.

There are two kinds of vaccine for the varicella zoster virus, one for chickenpox, another for shingles.

The chickenpox vaccine uses attenuated virus. This means that the virus is alive but a strain that cannot cause as severe a disease as the wild type. As a consequence, the attenuated virus can only spread in the dermatome it arrived in. People with the vaccine indeed can develop shingles, however it is **much less likely** comparing those that were infected with the wild type virus.

Shingles is a disease caused by the same virus that causes chicken pox. As I understand it, the vaccine is not 100% effective, and so yes, you might get shingles in the future. I do not know what causes the virus to become active again.>

This says you're less likely to get shingles:
Health organizations recommend children receive the varicella vaccine at one year old to protect them against chickenpox, but the vaccine appears to have another benefit: it cuts the risk of shingles, a painful and potentially debilitating rash caused by the reactivated chickenpox virus, by more than half in children ...Jun 11, 2019