I found an article over at the YNN website that is related to child wellness and shingles. It gives a good description of how the virus gets into our bodies as children when we become infected with chickenpox. You can view the rest of the article below.

“Shingles is actually a re-occurrence of varicella or chicken pox,” said Doctor Manny Cirenza.

Shingles, a dormant virus that lies in a nerve route in your spine, occurs during periods of stress.

“It is only on one side of the body, it generally occurs like a rash that looks like chicken pox and that you will see papules but usually significant pain,” said Cirenza.

The virus often affects people over the age of 50 but not always.

Most kids do get the vaccine, it’s required in order to enter public schools.

“The varivax vaccine generally given around 15 months of age and then 4 to 5 years of age in a booster dose,” Cirenza said.

If your child gets the vaccine, the chance of getting shingles is very slim, but if your child does come down with the chicken pox virus before they are vaccinated, there is fair chance that at some point, they will develop shingles.

The length of the virus does vary, if your child does come down with shingles you can expect them to have symptoms from just a few days to a few weeks.

“See some rash some generally blistering with the rash and a lot of ache and pains a lot with that sometimes times the pain can be very exquisite and can be very distracting,” Read More…

I’m sure my boyfriend doesn’t have herpes, a patient recently told Dr. Lydia Shrier, an adolescent medicine specialist at Children’s Hospital Boston.

How could she be so sure? Dr. Shrier asked. Because, the patient replied, she had scoped out his body and “there’s nothing irregular about him.”

Dr. Shrier, a researcher on sexually transmitted infections, goes through this kind of conversation all the time. Patients tell her that they’ve never had blisters or lesions or sores, and so cannot possibly have genital herpes. The same for their sexual partners.

It falls to her to disabuse them of these notions, saying: “You can have lesions or not, you can have symptoms or not, you should basically be operating the same way, which is to assume that everyone has herpes.” That means taking precautions, from limiting sexual contact to using condoms. Read More…

The lesson here is beware, take all possible precautions because you may be one of the lucky few who still does not have genital herpes. Considering the fact that herpes is incurable, you should do everything to protect yourself.