I have received a quite a few questions concerning chicken pox. Chicken pox has a fancier medical name called varicella zoster. It is a virus which infects the body causing the typical illness.
Humans are the only animals that get chicken pox.
Therefore, the only way to catch it is by being around a person who has it. When we get infected with any cold virus, it takes a while for the virus to replicate enough to cause symptoms. This period of being infected before symptoms show up is called the incubation period. The incubation time for chicken pox prior to the onset of the cold symptoms can be up to 24 days. Most people know about the rash, but chicken pox starts out looking just like a common cold.