HHV-6
I was going to start by saying that herpes is a fascinating virus. But then I realized that I thought the same of the cold virus... and HIV. So maybe I'm just fascinated in general by the simple complexity of any virus. Maybe it helps that I don't have the same "ooh, ick" reaction to herpes that other people do. I never learned of it as a sexually transmitted disease ("unclean! filthy!", as taught in high school health class, I suppose). To me, it's just another socially transmitted virus.
In my family, we get canker sores in our mouths. Usually, canker sores are a result of HHV-1 or HHV-2 (aka herpes simplex) infection. (edit: Correction is found in comments section.) It was interesting, though, that children always got it but spouses never did. So although I consider my canker sores to be a source of concern for my exposure to other pathogens, I rarely conceive of it as a source of infection to somebody else. I would, however, warn my last boyfriend when I felt one coming on, so we could avoid contact until it healed... just in case it was transmissible. I never fully believed it was transmissible in my case though, because spouses in my family seemed never to have the same issue as the children did.
I remember one relative who wasn't even old enough to speak yet, but I saw her point in her mouth at the sore there and then whimper to express her discomfort. My father would go to the doctor to have silver nitrate sticks used to burn out the sores in his mouth, they got so bad. I (of necessity) do a far better job at monitoring and regulating my stress level than other people in my family, so I seemed to have the lightest case of it in my extended family. I think it was sometime in the 1970s (during one of those silver nitrate visits) that my father was told he had "genetic herpes". I found the concept interesting, but I dismissed it since I could never find any medical validation of this diagnosis.
It turns out, though, that there is such a thing as genetic herpes.
In recent news, researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (Rochester, NY) have shown that HHV-6 infection (which causes roseola) in a parent can bury itself into the germ line, resulting in children who carry the code within their dna. Their study included 254 children, and they found:
"Of the infants who had congenital infections, 86 percent of them (37) had the virus integrated into their chromosomes."and
"HHV-6 DNA was found in the hair of one parent of all children with integrated virus with available parental samples (18 mothers and 11 fathers), which means the children acquired the integrated infections through their mother's egg or father's sperm at conception."
So, there could be a whole lot of people with herpetic "infection" who were never actually infected. Now that it's been shown with HHV-6, I look forward to studies that examine the possibility with other herpetic viruses.
In my family, we get canker sores in our mouths. Usually, canker sores are a result of HHV-1 or HHV-2 (aka herpes simplex) infection. (edit: Correction is found in comments section.) It was interesting, though, that children always got it but spouses never did. So although I consider my canker sores to be a source of concern for my exposure to other pathogens, I rarely conceive of it as a source of infection to somebody else. I would, however, warn my last boyfriend when I felt one coming on, so we could avoid contact until it healed... just in case it was transmissible. I never fully believed it was transmissible in my case though, because spouses in my family seemed never to have the same issue as the children did.
I remember one relative who wasn't even old enough to speak yet, but I saw her point in her mouth at the sore there and then whimper to express her discomfort. My father would go to the doctor to have silver nitrate sticks used to burn out the sores in his mouth, they got so bad. I (of necessity) do a far better job at monitoring and regulating my stress level than other people in my family, so I seemed to have the lightest case of it in my extended family. I think it was sometime in the 1970s (during one of those silver nitrate visits) that my father was told he had "genetic herpes". I found the concept interesting, but I dismissed it since I could never find any medical validation of this diagnosis.
It turns out, though, that there is such a thing as genetic herpes.
In recent news, researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (Rochester, NY) have shown that HHV-6 infection (which causes roseola) in a parent can bury itself into the germ line, resulting in children who carry the code within their dna. Their study included 254 children, and they found:
"Of the infants who had congenital infections, 86 percent of them (37) had the virus integrated into their chromosomes."and
"HHV-6 DNA was found in the hair of one parent of all children with integrated virus with available parental samples (18 mothers and 11 fathers), which means the children acquired the integrated infections through their mother's egg or father's sperm at conception."
So, there could be a whole lot of people with herpetic "infection" who were never actually infected. Now that it's been shown with HHV-6, I look forward to studies that examine the possibility with other herpetic viruses.