Herpes can be devastating, but treatment and testing are rare

Billions of people are living with the infection, but little progress has been made in treatment and testing.

When Lauren went to see her doctor with clusters of stinging sores on her genitals, she assumed the pain was from a urinary tract infection. But at OB-GYN, her doctor dabbed the bumps and told her the rash was herpes. "No," she remembers answering. "It's not."

At the time, Lauren, who requested that her last name be withheld in order to discuss family issues personal health, was a 19-year-old university student. She was in a two-year monogamous relationship with her second sexual partner - a guy who occasionally dealt with a wandering blister on his lip.

Little did they know cold sores can induce cold sores and that HSV-1, the virus responsible for cold sores, can be transmitted to the genitals. Lauren's boyfriend was convinced she had cheated on him and he broke up with her, she said.

Lauren became withdrawn and almost fail in college. "You think, why does anything still matter?" she says. "I will never date anyone. I will never have a boyfriend."

It was 2013. Over the past decade, Lauren n only had a few more flare-ups, none as painful as her. First of all. The mental strain – the depression she fell into after the diagnosis, the fear that her future partners wouldn't accept her – was, by far, the hardest part of coping with the disease. "It attacks your self-esteem," she said.

Herpes is extremely common: the World Health Organization estimates that 3.7 billion people are living with HSV-1, some oral and some genital. And cases like Lauren's, where HSV-1 spreads to the genitals during oral sex, have risen sharply over the past two decades, said Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School. of Medicine, specializing in sexually transmitted infections.

But herpes isn't a top priority for researchers, said Dr. Larry Corey, a professor and virologist at Seattle's Fred Hutch Cancer Center who studied the virus. It's not even the top priority of those studying sexually transmitted infections, he added. "The disease has kind of been ignored by both the pharmaceutical industry and the medical research establishment," he said.

It There are several potential reasons for this, experts say, including the relatively mild physical symptoms for most patients, the reluctance of clinicians to discuss sexual health, and the difficulty of developing a herpes vaccine.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">"The fact that a large part of the toll is psychological, which makes doctors uninterested," said Dr. Anna Wald, clinical virologist and professor of medicine at the College of Medicine from the University of Washington.

There has been little progress on more precise tests, vaccines or additional treatments in recent decades, said Dr Wald. Part of the challenge is that the herpes virus can hide inside neurons that are shielded from the immune system, making the body's immune response insufficient to eradicate the virus, she said - c This is why herpes stays in a person's body for life. Vaccination attempts, so far, have not stimulated an immune response capable of controlling the virus or preventing infection, she said.

  Health   Feb 18, 2023   0   34  Add to Reading List