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I don’t know about any of you reading this, but when I was younger it seemed to be the in thing amongst parents that if children came down with a disease like mumps, or Chicken Pox there was a sudden rush of all the healthy children to play with the poor afflicted child while they were still good and contagious, a sort of ‘Pox Party’ if you will. For the less innocent youth of today this is no longer a viable tactic, see the Chickenpox episode of South Park for the possible repercussions of such a tactic. The solution has been presented in the form of the Poxteddy.

The idea is that the cuddly toy will, over a length of time, expose children to a biologically engineered version of a virus in order build up the childs immunity to the disease. All very well in theory one would suppose, however thinking ethically is it preferable to knowingly expose a child to something that could make them very ill? This is of course without mentioning the hornets nest that would be introducing publicly available genetically altered viruses….

My personal opinion? This is a bit creepy, at least when playing with another infected child makes them ill, the child concerned will learn not to trust anyone, especially their parents.