Genital herpes is on the rise. Here’s what to know about this common infection
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released new estimates suggesting around 846 million people aged between 15 and 49 live with a genital herpes infection.
That’s equivalent to one in every five people from that age group.
At least one person each second (42 million people annually) contracts a new genital herpes infection.
So what is genital herpes, and are cases on the rise? Here’s what to know about this common infection.
First, what causes genital herpes?
Genital herpes is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) caused by the herpes simplex virus, which also causes cold sores.
There are two types of herpes simplex virus, HSV-1 and HSV-2 (and it’s possible to be infected by both at the same time).
HSV-1 most commonly spreads through oral contact such as kissing or sharing infected objects such as lip balm, cups or utensils, and presents as cold sores (or oral herpes) around the mouth. But it can also be sexually transmitted to cause a genital herpes infection.
An estimated 3.8 billion people under the age of 50 (64%) globally have HSV-1.
HSV-2 is less prevalent, but almost always causes a genital herpes infection. Some 520 million people aged 15–49 (13%) worldwide are believed to have HSV-2.
The initial episode of genital herpes can be quite painful, with blisters, ulcers and peeling skin around the genitals over 7–10 days.
Not all people have severe (or any) initial symptoms. This means a person might not know they have been infected with a herpes virus.
Herpes is a lifelong infection, which means once you contract the virus, you have it forever. After an initial episode, subsequent episodes can occur, but are usually less painful or even symptom free.
Both oral and genital herpes are particularly easy to spread when you have active lesions (cold sores or genital ulcers). But even with no symptoms, herpes can still be spread to a partner.
And although relatively rare, oral herpes can be transmitted to the genital area, and genital herpes can be transmitted to the mouth through oral sex.
If an expectant mother exhibits a genital herpes infection close to childbirth, there are risks to the baby. A herpes infection can be very serious in a baby, and the younger the infant, the more vulnerable they are. This is also one reason why you should avoid kissing a baby on the mouth.
Changing trends
WHO’s recent figures brought together data from around the world to estimate the prevalence of genital herpes in 2020, compared with previous estimates in 2012 and 2016.
This data shows no significant difference in the prevalence of genital herpes caused by HSV-2 since 2016, but does highlight increases in genital herpes infections caused by HSV-1.
The estimated number of genital HSV-1 infections globally was nearly twice as high in 2020 compared with 2016 (376 million compared with 192 million).
A 2022 study looking at Australia, New Zealand and Canada found more than 60% of genital herpes infections are still caused by HSV-2. But this is declining by about 2% each year while new genital infections that result from HSV-1 are rising.
There’s no simple fix, but safe sex is important
Genital herpes causes a substantial disease burden and economic cost to health-care services.
With such a large proportion of the world’s population infected with HSV-1, evidence this virus is increasingly causing genital herpes is concerning.
There’s no cure for genital herpes, but some medications, such as antivirals, can help reduce the amount of virus present in the system. While this won’t kill it completely, it helps to prevent symptomatic genital herpes recurrences, improve quality of life, and minimise the risk of transmission.
To prevent the spread of genital herpes and other STIs, practise safe sex, particularly if you’re not sure of your partner’s sexual health. You need to use a barrier method such as condoms to protect against STIs (a contraceptive such as the pill won’t work). This includes during oral sex.
As herpes is now so common, testing is not usually included as part of a regular sexual health check-up, except for in specific circumstances such as during pregnancy or severe episodes.
So it’s wise not to let your guard down, even if your partner insists they have received the all-clear from a recent check-up.
If there are herpes lesions present around the genitals, avoid sex entirely. Even condoms are not fully effective at these times, as exposed areas can still transmit the infection.
Immune health
If you are infected with HSV-1 or HSV-2 it’s more likely symptoms will appear when you’re stressed, tired or overwhelmed. During these times, our immune system may not be as functional, and dormant viruses such as herpes can start to develop quickly in our bodies.
To reduce the risk of recurrent herpes infections, try to eat healthily, get at least seven hours of sleep each night if possible, and look out for when your body may be telling you to take a step back and relax. This self-care can go a long way towards keeping latent viruses at bay.
While the prevalence has increased significantly in recent years, we have not lost the war on genital herpes just yet. Safe sexual practices, education and awareness can help reduce its spread, and the stigma around it.
If you have personal concerns, you should discuss them with a medical professional.
Christian Moro, Associate Professor of Science & Medicine, Bond University and Charlotte Phelps, Senior Teaching Fellow in Medicine, Bond University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Do We Need Sunscreen In Winter, Really?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small 😎
❝I keep seeing advice that we shoudl wear sunscreen out in winter even if it’s not hot or sunny, but is there actually any real benefit to this?❞
Short answer: yes (but it’s indeed not as critical as it is during summer’s hot/sunny days)
Longer answer: first, let’s examine the physics of summer vs winter when it comes to the sun…
In summer (assuming we live far enough from the equator to have this kind of seasonal variation), the part of the planet where we live is tilted more towards the sun. This makes it closer, and more importantly, it’s more directly overhead during the day. The difference in distance through space isn’t as big a deal as the difference in distance through the atmosphere. When the sun is more directly overhead, its rays have a shorter path through our atmosphere, and thus less chance of being blocked by cloud cover / refracted elsewhere / bounced back off into space before it even gets that far.
In winter, the opposite of all that is true.
Morning/evening also somewhat replicate this compared to midday, because the sun being lower in the sky has a similar effect to seasonal variation causing it to be less directly overhead.
For this reason, even though visually the sun may be just as bright on a winter morning as it is on a summer midday, the rays have been filtered very differently by the time they get to us.
This is one reason why you’re much less likely to get sunburned in the winter, compared to the summer (others include the actual temperature difference, your likely better hydration, and your likely more modest attire protecting you).
However…
The reason it is advisable to wear sunscreen in winter is not generally about sunburn, and is rather more about long-term cumulative skin damage (ranging from accelerated aging to cancer) caused by the UV rays—specifically, mostly UVA rays, since UVB rays (with their higher energy but shorter wavelength) have nearly all been blocked by the atmosphere.
Here’s a good explainer of that from the American Cancer Society:
UV (Ultraviolet) Radiation and Cancer Risk
👆 this may seem like a no-brainer, but there’s a lot explained here that demystifies a lot of things, covering ionizing vs non-ionizing radiation, x-rays and gamma-rays, the very different kinds of cancer caused by different things, and what things are dangerous vs which there’s no need to worry about (so far as best current science can say, at least).
Consequently: yes, if you value your skin health and avoidance of cancer, wearing sunscreen when out even in the winter is a good idea. Especially if your phone’s weather app says the UV index is “moderate” or above, but even if it’s “low”, it doesn’t hurt to include it as part of your skincare routine.
But what if sunscreens are dangerous?
Firstly, not all sunscreens are created equal:
Learn more: Who Screens The Sunscreens?
Secondly: consider putting on a protective layer of moisturizer first, and then the sunscreen on top. Bear in mind, this is winter we’re talking about, so you’re probably not going out in a bikini, so this is likely a face-neck-hands job and you’re done.
What about vitamin D?
Humans evolved to have more or less melanin in our skin depending on where we lived, and white people evolved to wring the most vitamin D possible out of the meagre sun far from the equator. Black people’s greater melanin, on the other hand, offers some initial protection against the sun (but any resultant skin cancer is then more dangerous than it would be for white people if it does occur, so please do use sunscreen whatever your skintone).
Nowadays many people live in many places which may or may not be the places we evolved for, and so we have to take that into account when it comes to sun exposure.
Here’s a deeper dive into that, for those who want to learn:
Take care!
Share This Post
-
Cooking for Longevity – by Nisha Melvani
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Before it gets to the recipes, this book kicks off with a lot of science (much more than is usual for even healthy-eating recipe books), demystifying more nutrients than most people think of on a daily basis, what they do and where to get them, and even how to enhance nutrient absorption.
As well as an up-front ingredients list, we additionally get not just meal planning advice in the usual sense of the word, but also advice on timing various aspects of nutrition in order to enjoy the best metabolic benefits.
The recipes themselves are varied and good. It’s rare to find a recipe book that doesn’t include some redundant recipes, and this one’s no exception, but it’s better to have too much information than too little, so it’s perhaps no bad thing that all potentially necessary bases are covered.
In terms of how well it delivers on the title’s promised “cooking for longevity” and the subtitle’s promised “boosting healthspan”, the science is good; very consistent with what we write here at 10almonds, and well-referenced too.
Bottom line: if you’d like recipes to help you live longer and more healthily, then this book has exactly that.
Click here to check out Cooking For Longevity, and cook for longevity!
Share This Post
-
Passion Fruit vs Pomegranate – Which is Healthier?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Our Verdict
When comparing passion fruit to pomegranate, we picked the passion fruit.
Why?
Both of these fruits have beaten a lot of other contenders, so it’s time to pit them against each other:
In terms of macros, passion fruit has more protein, carbs, and fiber, the ratio of which meaning also that passion fruit has the lower glycemic index. So, we say passion fruit wins on macros.
In the category of vitamins, things are more even; passion fruit has more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B6, and C, while pomegranate has more of vitamins B1, B5, B9, E, and K. In light of this 5:5 tie, and since passion fruit’s overall vitamin coverage is better (in terms of meeting RDA needs) but pomegranate’s vitamins are often in shorter supply in diet, we’re calling it a tie on vitamins.
When it comes to minerals, passion fruit has more calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium, while pomegranate has more copper, manganese, and zinc. That’s already an easy 6:3 win for passion fruit, before we even consider the fact that passion fruit’s minerals’ margin of difference is greater too.
Adding it up makes for a clear win for passion fruit. As ever when it comes to plants, enjoy both if you can, though!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
Take care!
Share This Post
-
Can You Step Backwards Without Your Foot Or Torso Turning Out?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Walking backwards is often overlooked, but research shows it can enhance forward walking, especially in stroke patients; it has other benefits for everyone else, too. The physiotherapists at Fitness4Life Physical Therapy explain:
…and one step back
How it works: walking backwards heightens proprioception and stimulates muscles, improving balance and posture. Additionally, our daily lives tend to involve forward-leaning postures, causing upper back bending, and walking backwards helps counterbalance this.
Extra benefits: training to walk backwards can reduce the risk of falls, as stepping back is a common movement that is often untrained.
Exercise: try doing backwards lunges, to assess your skill and balance while moving backward. If foot rotation or torso rotation occurs during the exercise, then there’s room for improvement. Correcting these movements is then simply a matter of practicing backward lunges without turning.
10almonds tip: any exercise is only as good as your will to actually do it. For this reason, dancing is a great exercise in this case, as almost all forms of dance involve stepping backwards (in order to have steps without travelling somewhere, forwards steps are usually balanced with backwards ones)
For more on all this, plus a visual demonstration of the exercise, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Fall Special ← About how to avoid falling, and how to avoid (and failing that, at least minimize) injury if you do fall. If you think this only happens to other/older people, remember, there’s a first time for everything, so it is better to be prepared in advance!
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – by Dr. Lindsay Gibson
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Not everyone had the best of parents, and the harm done can last well beyond childhood. This book looks at healing that.
Dr. Gibson talks about four main kinds of “difficult” parents, though of course they can overlap:
- The emotional parent, with their unpredictable outbursts
- The driven parent, with their projected perfectionism
- The passive parent, with their disinterest and unreliability
- The rejecting parent, with their unavailability and insults
For all of them, it’s common that nothing we could do was ever good enough, and that leaves a deep scar. To add to it, the unfavorable dynamic often persists in adult life, assuming everyone involved is still alive and in contact.
So, what to do about it? Dr. Gibson advocates for first getting a good understanding of what wasn’t right/normal/healthy, because it’s easy for a lot of us to normalize the only thing we’ve ever known. Then, beyond merely noting that no child deserved that lack of compassion, moving on to pick up the broken pieces one by one, and address each in turn.
The style of the book is anecdote-heavy (case studies, either anonymized or synthesized per common patterns) in a way that will probably be all-too-relatable to a lot of readers (assuming that if you buy this book, it’s for a reason), science-moderate (references peppered into the text; three pages of bibliography), and practicality-dense—that is to say, there are lots of clear usable examples, there are self-assessment questionnaires, there are worksheets for now making progress forward, and so forth.
Bottom line: if one or more of the parent types above strikes a chord with you, there’s a good chance you could benefit from this book.
Click here to check out Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and rebuild yourself!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
12 Questions For Better Brain Health
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
We usually preface our “Expert Insights” pieces with a nice banner that has a stylish tall cutout that allows us to put a photo of the expert in. Today we’re not doing that, because for today’s camera-shy expert, we could only find one photo, and it’s a small, grainy, square headshot that looks like it was taken some decades ago, and would not fit our template at all. You can see it here, though!
In any case, Dr. Linda Selwa is a neurologist and neurophysiologist with nearly 40 years of professional experience.
The right questions to ask
As a neurologist, she found that one of the problems that results in delayed interventions (and thus, lower efficacy of those interventions) is that people don’t know there’s anything to worry about until a degenerative brain condition has degenerated past a certain point. With that in mind, she bids us ask ourselves the following questions, and discuss them with our primary healthcare providers as appropriate:
- Sleep: Are you able to get sufficient sleep to feel rested?
- Affect, mood and mental health: Do you have concerns about your mood, anxiety, or stress?
- Food, diet and supplements: Do you have concerns about getting enough or healthy enough food, or have any questions about supplements or vitamins?
- Exercise: Do you find ways to fit physical exercise into your life?
- Supportive social interactions: Do you have regular contact with close friends or family, and do you have enough support from people?
- Trauma avoidance: Do you wear seatbelts and helmets, and use car seats for children?
- Blood pressure: Have you had problems with high blood pressure at home or at doctor visits, or do you have any concerns about blood pressure treatment or getting a blood pressure cuff at home?
- Risks, genetic and metabolic factors: Do you have trouble controlling blood sugar or cholesterol? Is there a neurological disease that runs in your family?
- Affordability and adherence: Do you have any trouble with the cost of your medicines?
- Infection: Are you up to date on vaccines, and do you have enough information about those vaccines?
- Negative exposures: Do you smoke, drink more than one to two drinks per day, or use non-prescription drugs? Do you drink well water, or live in an area with known air or water pollution?
- Social and structural determinants of health: Do you have concerns about keeping housing, having transportation, having access to care and medical insurance, or being physically or emotionally safe from harm?
You will note that some of these are well-known (to 10almonds readers, at least!) risk factors for cognitive decline, but others are more about systemic and/or environmental considerations, things that don’t directly pertain to brain health, but can have a big impact on it anyway.
About “concerns”: in the case of those questions that ask “do you have concerns about…?”, and you’re not sure, then yes, you do indeed have concerns.
About “trouble”: as for these kinds of health-related questionnaires in general, if a question asks you “do you have trouble with…?” and your answer is something like “no, because I have a special way of dealing with that problem” then the answer for the purposes of the questionnaire is yes, you do indeed have trouble.
Note that you can “have trouble with” something that you simultaneously “have under control”—just as a person can have no trouble at all with something that they leave very much out of control.
Further explanation on each of the questions
If you’re wondering what is meant by any of these, or what counts, or why the question is even being asked, then we recommend you check out Dr. Selwa et al’s recently-published paper, then all is explained in there, in surprisingly easy-to-read fashion:
Emerging Issues In Neurology: The Neurologist’s Role in Promoting Brain Health
If you scroll past the abstract, introduction, and disclaimers, then you’ll be straight into the tables of information about the above 12 factors.
Want to be even more proactive?
Check out:
How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
