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Hi I'm Barry Margulies, I'm an associate professor in the Department of Biology here at
Towson, and I study ***. Most people think of ***
as only a sexually transmitted disease, but it turns out that
*** viruses are a really big family of viruses that infect
all kinds of different species from humans all the way down to oysters.
When we're talking about people though, we're really talking about
eight different human *** viruses and I want to concentrate on three.
The first one is *** simplex virus type 1
the causative agent for cold sores and fever blisters. *** simplex type 2,
that virus is the one you normally think of with STDs
that's the one that cause genital sores. And Varicella Zoster Virus causes chickenpox and
shingles.
One of the key features of *** infections
is something called latency. Once an individual is infected
the virus stays with them for life and it stays in this latent
quiet state. The virus is subject to re-activations at any time
and that's how you can see recurrent infections show up in people, like when they get cold
sores again.
About sixty to eighty percent of us in this country are positive for HSV one,
and about sixty to eighty percent of us are positive for VZV. So you might ask
if there are that many people who are positive for each of these viruses
why don't we see tens of millions of infections
around us? And it's because most of us have very good immune systems.
Our own immune systems are keeping these viruses suppressed, it's the reactivations
of the viruses
out of latency where we see disease. Most of these
are mere annoyances but in those who are Immunocompromised,
they can actually be life-threatening recurrences.
So for those who do have reactivations, there are wonderful medicines on the
market
and if you are a patient who is taking some of these drugs it's very important that you follow
your physician's recommendations
in order to limit the scope of disease and to reduce the possibility of transmission.