Mexican health authorities will administer 1,300 chickenpox vaccine doses because of an outbreak of the disease at a migrant shelter in Juárez.

There have been 127 confirmed chickenpox cases at the Leona Vicario migrant shelter in Juárez, Chihuahua state public health officials said Tuesday.

Health officials said that more than 70% of the infected patients are children under the age of 15.

The patients include 57 from Honduras, 25 from Guatemala, 27 from El Salvador, nine from Nicaragua, four from Venezuela, two from Ecuador, one Cuban and two from the Mexican state of Michoacán, the Chihuahua public health department said.

There are seven other possible cases under review, state health officials said.

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The Mexican federal government is sending the vaccine doses Tuesday and Wednesday so that they can be administered at the migrant shelter, Chihuahua officials said.

Thousands of migrants from Central America, Cuba and other parts of the world have arrived in recent years in Juárez with the hope of seeking political asylum in the United States.

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Chickenpox, named "varicela" in Spanish, causes a rash of itchy blisters and is highly contagious for people who haven't had it or who have not been vaccinated.

The disease, which mainly affects children, has an incubation period of about 14 days since exposure.

Chickenpox used to be common in the United States with an average of 4 million cases in the early 1990s before the vaccine became available in the U.S. in 1995, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated.

There have been concerns about limited amounts of the vaccine and a possible epidemic at migrant shelters in other Mexican border cities.

U.S. immigration officials have been forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for judges to decide their cases under a program named the Migrant Protection Protocols.

Daniel Borunda may be reached at 915-546-6102; dborunda@elpasotimes.com; @BorundaDaniel on Twitter.