Salt Lake City descended upon by Herpes...

OK, so maybe it was an army of herpes virologists, but scary for the residents of SLC nonethless. 

I must apologize for my absense from the blogosphere the past 10 days as I was attending a conference in SLC all about the Herps.  Now don't get too many crazy ideas, it was a professional meeting and as some of you know, I am studying vaccines to prevent infection of a specific Herpes virus and my return from the meeting has got Herpes on my mind.  Given that, I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk a little bit about the life that is herpes.

So, most everyone by the age of 15 knows about Herpes, well, atleast the type advertised on TV (just be glad they don't show any pictures of lesions).  What most people don't know is there is actually 8 human herpes viruses and its most likely you have atleast five of them in your body already (numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6).  Chickenpox, Mono, cold sores, and rosacea are all caused by primary infection with my favorite little bugs and are what most people are familiar with.  It just so happens though, that Herpes viruses can also be much more devastating, leading to encephalitis, shingles, liver failure, lymphoma, blindess and even death.  Of course not all 8 cause all these ailments, but between them all, you got everything covered.  Fortunately many of the herpes viruses can be controlled by very good drugs (yes, valtrex is one of the best) but they are not the only solution.  We also have a vaccine for Varicella Zoster Virus (VZV or HHV3 or chickenpox/shingels) that is used in children and elderly adults.  There is also a vaccine for genital herpes, but unfortunately, that only works for women who have never seen HSV-1 or HSV-2 (a very small number indeed). 

Given the limited number of effective vaccines to the herpes viruses, there is a continued effort to make new ones, and that focus was present at the meeting.  I work on a vaccine for Cytomegalovirus (human herpes virus five), which costs our health care systems billions of dollars a year to treat infants that were unfortunate to be exposed early during gestation.  Sadly, we are a long way off from a vaccine for this little bugger or any of the other herpes viruses.  Forunately the money from the NIH seems to be flowing non stop in an effort to curtail the disease associated with these viruses.