How To Prevent The Spread Of Genital Herpes

How To Stop The Spread Of Stis

There two methods of eradicating STI

Though this spread can be stopped only and only if the means of eradicating it are put into great consideration and practice.

• Isolation though WHO asked those infected to be able to reach out to public so as not to be stigmatized. However, when those infected are quarantined and been given maximal care, this spread will stop. Thereby the rate of exposure to body/blood fluid, sex with infected persons will be reduced. More careful watch on them by the Health Practitioners, in regulating their meals, drugs and health.

• Screening constant screening is another way of getting a maximal protection. However, it is, from the Health organization that sexually active women under the age of 25 and those over 25 at risk should be screened for chlamydia and gonorrhea yearly. This is as the result of the increase in rape. So individuals who are victims to such should be screened. Not only for those infections but to identify the presence of infection to prevent infertility in women, to identify HIV and those who have been exposed to hepatitis and HCV.

• Vaccination vaccines are available which helps in preventing some of these viral STIs such as Hepatitis A, B and some types of HPV. Vaccination before any initiation of sexual contact is advisable to assure maximal protection. Though more vaccines are been researched on and still developing.

• Counseling and behavioral Method

Epidemiology And Risk Factors

HSV-1 infections are quite common and most often acquired during childhood.35 Among United States adults, almost 90% are exposed to HSV-1 by the time they are 50.6 Between 2005 and 2010, the percentage of HSV-1 seroprevalence in the US was 53.9, which is more than three times higher than the seroprevalence of HSV-2.7 HSV-1 prevalence among women is higher than for men .8

An inverse relationship exists between seroprevalence of HSV-1 infections and an individuals socioeconomic background.9 Lower socioeconomic populations have HSV-1 infections occurring early in life, before the age of 5. Also, HSV-1 infections are generally higher among immunocompromised individuals due to reduced systemic resistance.10

HSV-1 infections are often thought of as above the belt however, genital herpes may also be caused by HSV-1.11,12 The known risk factor for initial infection of HSV-1 is generally contact with infected saliva and oral lesion secretions from another already infected individual. The primary transmission mode is asymptomatic shedding of the virus, compared to lesion shedding. Risk factors for recurrent HSV-1 include trauma such as diffuse axonal injury, stress , reduced cellular immunity, fever, sunlight, and ultraviolet radiation exposure.4,5,11,13

The Early Warning Signs Of Genital Herpes

Once you learn to identify the early warning signs of a genital herpes outbreak, you can take action to avoid the worst outbreak symptoms.

The most common sign of genital herpes is the development of blisters around the genital area. Herpes simplex blisters are often itchy and painful.

Other symptoms may accompany the blisters to indicate early warning signs of genital herpes:

• -Difficult or painful urination

• -Wash your hands immediately after any possible contact with sores to prevent the spread of infection
• -Take medication as directed by your healthcare professional
• -Use natural treatments known to reduce discomfort and accelerate healing
• -Use foods and supplements known to strengthen your immune system
• -Use the Luminance RED on current outbreaks and in-between

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If I Already Have Herpes How Can I Keep From Giving It To Someone Else

You can do several things to keep from spreading genital herpes:

Consider sexual abstinence .

What Can I Do To Prevent Genital Herpes Infection

To try to reduce the chance of getting genital herpes, its important that you use condoms for any sexual contact including oral sex. You should also avoid any contact with infected blisters or ulcers that contain the virus. This should include not touching infected genitals with your hand.

You should avoid sharing sex-toys too, and wash your hands thoroughly if youve touched any blisters. The virus is most contagious when an outbreak is visible.

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Is There A Treatment For Genital Herpes

Several medicines can help. Acyclovir , famciclovir and valacyclovir can be used for genital herpes. Your doctor can prescribe one of these medicines for you. There are two ways to take the medicine: suppressive and episodic.

Suppressive treatment keeps herpes sores from coming back. You have to take one or more pills every day for a long time. This can be expensive. When you stop taking the pills, the sores might come back again. However, if you have many sores and they hurt a lot, ask your doctor about suppressive therapy.

With episodic treatment, you only take medicine when you start to get a sore. The medicine makes the sore hurt less and go away faster. This works best if you take the medicine within a few hours after the first signs that you are getting a sore. Episodic treatment doesnt keep sores from coming back another time.

Take good care of yourself and eat a healthy diet, because the sores often come back when your resistance is weak.

Treatment Of Genital Herpes

Unfortunately, and as with other types of herpes, genital herpes has no cure , the treatments used are used to reduce the intensity or frequency of the outbreaks.

Medications commonly prescribed for this condition are antivirals such as acyclovir or valacyclovir that will help decrease the burning, pain, and discomfort caused by the blisters. In some cases they can be prescribed for a longer period of time to decrease the frequency or duration of outbreaks when they occur very frequently.

Many people who suffer from genital herpes suffer from a single outbreak and never have it again, while others have symptoms with some frequency, in those cases treatment should be started as soon as the first discomfort appears. All types of sexual contact should be avoided during these episodes, it is also appropriate to inform your partner that you suffer from this condition to take the necessary measures.

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How To Prevent Herpes Transmission

Many doctors get this question about stopping the spread of genital herpes from a partner to another. However, there is a concept of asymptomatic shedding of HSV. Many people dont know about this shedding. It means that you can even contract the virus even if your partner doesnt have sores on their genitals. Fortunately, you can take some action to prevent transmission. Following are several important pieces of information that can help you reduce the risk of transmitting HSV.

How Much Time Does It Take For Valacyclovir To Work

Valacyclovir is not the complete cure for genital herpes. It is possible that while using Valacyclovir, you may experience shedding, and lesions may occur. While Valacyclovir can reduce the outbreaks, there is still a risk of transmission. If your partner is experiencing a herpes outbreak, you must avoid getting sexual. Moreover, asymptomatic shedding is difficult to detect, so you should use condoms consistently to minimize the risks.

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How To Avoid Spreading Herpes

Whether it is genital herpes or oral herpes, this condition can be a difficult one to manage because it is so easy to spread the virus. Learning how to avoid spreading herpes is very important for everyone who suffers an outbreak, and it is vital that safe practices be used. Even during times of no outbreak, the following practices will help to insure that the virus cannot be spread. Here are some guidelines that can explain how to avoid spreading the herpes virus.

What Are The Complications

Complications are rare, but some people especially those with weakened immune systems, such as people with HIV, may have trouble fighting the virus and get a secondary infection in the eye, fingers, joints, throat, colon, liver, lungs or brain.

If you are pregnant, and you or your partner have a history of herpes, it is important to inform your health care provider. There are steps that can be taken to help prevent the virus being passed to the baby. This is most likely to happen if the mother has a primary first outbreak in the third trimester. Herpes can cause serious complications for the baby, including death. Women who have genital herpes before they become pregnant are at very low risk of passing it to their infant.

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Treatment If The Blisters Come Back

Go to a GP or sexual health clinic if you have been diagnosed with genital herpes and need treatment for an outbreak.

Antiviral medicine may help shorten an outbreak by 1 or 2 days if you start taking it as soon as symptoms appear.

But outbreaks usually settle by themselves, so you may not need treatment.

Recurrent outbreaks are usually milder than the first episode of genital herpes.

Over time, outbreaks tend to happen less often and be less severe. Some people never have outbreaks.

Some people who have more than 6 outbreaks in a year may benefit from taking antiviral medicine for 6 to 12 months.

If you still have outbreaks of genital herpes during this time, you may be referred to a specialist.

How Does Genital Herpes Affect Pregnancy

• If you get genital herpes during pregnancy, you can spread genital herpes to your baby during delivery.
• If you had genital herpes before pregnancy, your baby is still at risk of getting herpes, but the risk is lower.

Most women with genital herpes have healthy babies. But babies who get herpes from their mother have neonatal herpes. Neonatal herpes is a serious condition that can cause problems in a newborn baby such as brain damage, eye problems, or even death.

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Talk To Your Doctor About Antiviral Medications

There are two brands of antiviral medications available to treat herpes. Either can be used to take daily as a suppressive therapy or episodically when there is an outbreak. Discuss with your doctor how often you are experiencing outbreaks and your symptoms. Together you can decide which, if any, medication is best for you.

Treatment The First Time You Have Genital Herpes

You may be prescribed:

• antiviral medicine to stop the symptoms getting worse you need to start taking this within 5 days of the symptoms appearing
• cream for the pain

If you have had symptoms for more than 5 days before you go to a sexual health clinic, you can still get tested to find out the cause.

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Im Pregnant How Could Genital Herpes Affect My Baby

If you are pregnant and have genital herpes, it is very important for you to go to prenatal care visits. Tell your doctor if you have ever had symptoms of, or have been diagnosed with, genital herpes. Also tell your doctor if you have ever been exposed to genital herpes. There is some research that suggests that genital herpes infection may lead to miscarriage, or could make it more likely for you to deliver your baby too early.

Herpes infection can be passed from you to your unborn child before birth but is more commonly passed to your infant during delivery. This can lead to a potentially deadly infection in your baby . It is important that you avoid getting herpes during pregnancy. If you are pregnant and have genital herpes, you may be offered anti-herpes medicine towards the end of your pregnancy. This medicine may reduce your risk of having signs or symptoms of genital herpes at the time of delivery. At the time of delivery, your doctor should carefully examine you for herpes sores. If you have herpes symptoms at delivery, a C-section is usually performed.

Where Does The Herpes Virus Live In The Body

The herpes simplex viruses are latent, meaning they can live in the body without causing symptoms. After the initial infection, the virus gets into the nerve roots and spreads to the sensory nerve ganglia, the junctions where nerves from different parts of the body come together. For the genital area, the ganglia are adjacent to the spinal cord in the lower back. For orofacial herpes , the ganglia are located behind the cheek bone.

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Genital Herpes: How Can You Prevent The Spread Of Herpes In Sexual Relationships

Herpes viruses are most likely to be transmitted during an outbreak, so it’s better to not have sex during this time. Herpes can also be passed on to others in symptom-free phases, though. This risk can be reduced considerably by using condoms.

If you have genital herpes, there are some things you can do on your own to protect your partner from infection. The main things are

• not having sex during an outbreak,
• using condoms during symptom-free phases, and
• talking openly with your partner about the disease.

Preventive treatment with antiviral medication may be an option for people who have genital herpes very frequently. This medication inhibits the activity of the virus, thereby lowering the risk of infecting partners.

Coping With Your Feelings

Finding out that you have genital herpes may cause you to have negative thoughts or feelings about yourself or about sex, such as:

• Feeling ashamed or embarrassed.
• Being afraid of the consequences of the infection.
• Being angry at the person who infected you.
• Feeling frustrated with treatment or recurrent outbreaks.
• Feeling scared to have sex.

A counsellor or support groups for people with herpes may be helpful.

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What Happens At A Sexual Health Clinic

The doctor or nurse at the sexual health clinic will:

• ask about your symptoms and your sexual partners
• use a small cotton bud to take some fluid from 1 of your blisters or sores for testing

The test cannot:

• be done if you do not have visible blisters or sores
• tell you how long you have had herpes or who you got it from

Symptoms might not appear for weeks or even years after you’re infected with the herpes virus.

If you have genital herpes, your previous sexual partners should get tested.

The doctor or nurse at the clinic can discuss this with you and help you tell your partners without letting them know it’s you who has the virus.

Screening For Hsv Infection

The CDC currently does not recommend routine screening for HSV-2 in the general population. This is due to several factors, such as the expense of testing, the risk of false-positives, and a lack of evidence of reduced spread of disease when asymptomatic patients are tested. Patients who should be screened for HSV-2 include those whose sexual partner has a known history of genital herpes and those who have multiple sexual partners.10 Tissue culture is the most specific and sensitive method for diagnosing the initial episode of genital herpes however, it is relatively insensitive when used during later stages of genital-ulcer healing or during recurrent infections. In those situations, viral culture is preferred. Although diagnosis can be confirmed only by laboratory testing, less stringent diagnostic criteria are frequently used in practice.1

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How Effective Is Medication At Preventing Infection

If you have genital herpes, you will probably be somewhat less likely to infect your partner if you use antiviral medication for prevention. The medications used for this purpose include aciclovir, famciclovir and valaciclovir. They must be taken every day over a long period of time, though. One study showed that over a period of eight months,

• 4 out of 100 people became infected when the partner with the virus took a placebo, and
• 2 out of 100 people became infected when the partner with the virus took antiviral medication every day.

These couples were also advised to use condoms as well but many didn’t use them consistently. So its not clear whether taking antiviral medication can lower the risk of infection even further if you always use condoms anyway, or whether using condoms is just as effective on its own.

Whether or not you would like to use preventive medication is ultimately an individual decision. Many factors can play a role, such as how long you or your partner have had the infection, how frequent and severe the outbreaks are, whether you are male or female, the frequency of sexual contact and whether you use condoms.

Nih Researchers Show How Anti

Newfound effectiveness of tenofovir due to higher concentrations in vaginal gel form.

An anti-HIV drug also discovered to stop the spread of the genital herpes virus does so by disabling a key DNA enzyme of the herpes virus, according to findings by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and other institutions.

The study was published online in Cell Host and Microbes and was conducted by researchers at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium the University of Rome Gilead Sciences, Inc., Foster City, Calif and the NIHs Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development .

The findings explain the results of a recent clinical trial showing that the anti-HIV drug tenofovir, when it is formulated as a vaginal gel, could reduce the risk of herpes simplex virus infections as well as HIV infections in women.

Tenofovir taken orally had been demonstrated to inhibit reproduction of HIV, but had not been known to block the genital herpes virus.

Discoveries leading to new uses for previously approved drugs have the potential to save millions of dollars, Dr. Margolis said. New drugs typically undergo years of testing for safety and effectiveness before they are approved for patients. Finding new uses for an approved drug increases the value of the initial investment in testing, because most of the testing has previously been completed.

NIHTurning Discovery Into Health®

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