WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A report out of Arizona has alerted the nation’s vaccine-fearing parents that they are just a Facebook friend away from exposing their child to chickenpox via virus-laced lollipops or “pox parties.”

But health and legal authorities want any parent considering infecting a child in this way to step away from the computer.

For one, the Facebook page that started the controversy offered to mail these parents items contaminated with pathogens. Mailing live viruses is illegal.

Second, it may not work. Contracting the disease is not as simple as a lollipop, a plastic bag and a stamp.

Finally, if parents succeed in getting their kid sick by exposing them to an infected child or things contaminated by one, there may be serious, even deadly, consequences, doctors say.

“It’s a really bad idea for a variety of reasons,” said Dr. Rafael Harpaz of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “Doing this is to some degree like playing Russian roulette.”

The U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee warns: “Sending a virus or disease through the U.S. mail is illegal. Also it is against federal law to adulterate or tamper with consumer products such as candy. Finally, it is illegal to introduce into interstate commerce unauthorized biological materials,” according to CNN.

Dr. Tommy Schectman, who has a practice in Palm Beach Gardens and Jupiter, Fla., can count two deaths.

“Why are you taking that chance?” Schectman said. “I’ve dealt with two children who died from chickenpox. Parents need to understand their child is vulnerable, so why risk something that’s preventable?”

Still, it didn’t surprise Dr. Daniel Kraft, a Boynton Beach, Fla., pediatrician, to learn some parents have turned to the Internet and social media to give the chickenpox vaccine the end run.

Those parents question all vaccines, saying they can bring side effects such as neurological disorders and that children can have a stronger immunity to the disease by surviving a natural case of it.

“Chickenpox is one of those vaccines they question more because they say, ‘How bad can chickenpox really be?’ ” Kraft said.

Even if parents are bent on exposing their child to the disease rather than the vaccine, a mail-order solution is dubious, said the CDC’s Harpaz, a medical epidemiologist.

Health experts have warned that parents who order up a serving of chickenpox may get something else in the bargain, such as hepatitis.