GOATS AND SODA – Genital herpes infections are very common.
There are 42 million new infections each year — that averages out to one new person infected each second.
While treatments can help with symptoms, there’s no cure. So once someone gets infected, they’ve got the virus for life. In the 15-to-49-year-old age range, 1 in 5 people are living with a genital herpes infection — that’s about 846 million people.
These estimates were published this month in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections.
“It is incredibly valuable [to have these new estimates], so that it is not the forgotten virus forever,” says Dr. Keith Jerome, a professor of virology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center who was not involved with the study.” [GOATS AND SODA content continues after video … ]
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We’re talking about literally hundreds of millions of people living with these infections, I think it really reinforces the case that it’s time to put some more effort into finding new and better therapies and treatments.”
NPR spoke with one of the study authors: Laith Abu-Raddad, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the Qatar campus of Weill Cornell Medicine, to understand what’s driving these huge numbers.
When talking about his work, Abu-Raddad says one of the first questions he’s asked is whether case counts are going up or down.
The answer, he says, is not so simple. For starters, the methods used to make the estimations have changed a lot over the years as has the data the researchers are using in their analysis.
And then there’s the fact that there are two types of herpes simplex virus that cause genital herpes – HSV-1 and HSV-2.
HSV-1 is less common as the source of genital herpes and typically shows up as oral herpes – mouth sores. HSV-2 is responsible for 90% of genital herpes episodes and is known to flare up over the years …
