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Comment by newnewpdro | Hacker News Reader

You're ignoring how life-altering it becomes as one ages and the immune system declines.

I've had elderly relatives down with shingles, caused by the herpes virus, for months. Their shingles being a very latent reappearance of Chickenpox acquired in childhood. These viruses are opportunistic, and you will grow weaker in time, if you don't die first.

The stigma, in this case, is appropriate in my opinion.

It surprises me how cavalier everyone has been about HPV and Chickenpox throughout my lifetime. At least we've finally appreciated how HPV causes most cervical cancers and have developed routine immunization there. We badly need to develop Herpes vaccines. I'm confident once we have them, it will conveniently become "discovered" that HSV has been quietly responsible for some prolific form of suffering like Alzheimers and/or Parkinsons all this time.

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I don't think anybody's claiming that having HSV is better than not having HSV, but the fact is that it's incredibly common. It's been with us for millennia and it's not going anywhere until medicine and technology figure out a way to wipe it out. To quote herpes.com stats:

> By the time they're teenagers or young adults, about 50% of Americans have HSV-1 antibodies in their blood. By the time they are over age 50, some 80-90% of Americans have HSV-1 antibodies.

And this is HSV1 alone. You add HSV2 to it and, I believe according to some stats, you end up with 80% of the world population having some variation of it. Stigmatizing 4 out of 5 people in the world makes no sense and is helping nobody. You can't avoid getting it, unless you never interact with another human being, and treating others like broken goods until you become one too (because it IS only a matter of time) is inhumane.

On a related note, I believe the majority of the stigma comes from HSV2, which I'm sure has much more to do with sexual morality than with medicine. Nobody blinks an eye if you have its oral counterpart, you go to CVS and buy a Blistex. However, if you have the genital version, now THAT is a problem. Same virus, vastly different reaction.

In your own words you stated:

> It's not life altering in any way besides the fact that HSV2 has such a strong stigma <snip>...

It is potentially quite life-altering, and you may agree with me after you're over 60 years old. If you instead asserted "it hasn't been life-altering in any way so far besides..." then I wouldn't have replied at all.

Adding a persistent genital herpes outbreak to six months of shingles in old age qualifies as life-altering in my book.

Your comment comes across as if everyone should get over it and not exclude partners infected with genital herpes from their intimate lives, that this stigma exists just because it's associated with sex.

Nobody wants to be infected with any form of the herpes virus, the variants of which will cumulatively add life-altering complications when your immune system deteriorates. Genital herpes is appropriately highly stigmatized because it has the most potential for effective prevention through avoidance.

Choice of sexual partner is already culturally accepted as a highly discrimatory exercise, it basically goes unnoticed for the uninfected population to exclude those infected with genital herpes from their sex lives, it's not like the uninfected end up without sufficient available partners as a result. It has zero impact on their daily goings on. Compare that to the futility of stigmatizing Chickenpox however, the difference seems obvious.

In the other commenter's defence, HSV is not life-altering for most people. IIRC, most people who carry HSV experience no symptoms (although that may not take into account the potential risk for Alzheimers later).

For a not-insignificant minority, HSV is life-altering. Both for the reasons you've mentioned, and also for increased instance of suicide, and increased risk of infant mortality if the mother is experiencing an outbreak during birth.

>I'm confident once we have them, it will conveniently become "discovered" that HSV has been quietly responsible for some prolific form of suffering like Alzheimers and/or Parkinsons all this time.

Not sure if you were making reference to a specific belief, but there's already some evidence that HSV1 may be part of the Alzheimer's cause puzzle [1].

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4019841/

I'd read some inconclusive but suggestive articles correlating them in the past.

Can you provide a source other than anecdotes of relatives?

A source for what, that people's immune systems weaken as they age?

WRT Herpes Simplex recurrence in particular: "Causes of recurrence may include: decreased immune function, stress, and sunlight exposure." [1]

This isn't unique to Herpes, if you have HPV it's going to be an increasing nuisance with age. A major component of what makes growing old awful is everything your immune system kept in check slowly consumes you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunosenescence

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