Helpliners are regularly contacted to keep them involved with latest news and a new helpliner commented:
Herpes simplex is just a cold sore lower down. There is no need for doctors to use the medical term. Do they say “chickenpox” or do they say “herpes varicella” when seeing a sick kid? Wouldn’t if be wonderful and helpful if when they diagnosed us and they would say: “It’s a cold sore you have there. No treatment is necessary as it’ll go away by itself. However if you have a bad case, there’s a course of antiviral tablets to help it clear up.”
If asked how it is caught, they could say: “By direct skin contact with the affected part, so don’t let anyone else touch it – apart from the person you got it from or another person who already has it.” That is what people with cold sores are told. Nothing about “always kiss through a sheet of cling film as there’s a tiny risk you can pass it one when you don’t have a cold sore” – when it is a fact that facial sores are even more likely to be passed on when no symptoms are present.
The doctors could say: “It is so lucky you have caught it genitally as it cannot cause any further complications.” (This is because very, very rarely a facial infection reactivates in the eye or brain, which is nasty and will need to be treated with aciclovir, whereas genitally it does nothing like that.)Elizabeth Crawley
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