Category: News

The Sun (23-9-15) Wrote About a Mum Who is Asking People Not to Kiss New Babies

Because Claire Henderson had never had a cold sore (or any other herpes simplex virus) her baby did not have any antibody protection when someone with a cold sore kissed baby Brooke.  The newborn baby became very ill. Luckily, the hospital put the baby on an aciclovir drip and this ensured that she made a full recovery.

If you have genital herpes, cold sores, or whitlows (on the finger), your new babies have ‘borrowed’ antibody protection that will last them until they are old enough to catch things without danger.  So you do not have to worry about infecting your baby.

Since no one knows the antibody status of a new baby, don’t kiss a baby that is not yours!

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Vaccine against shingles 

This vaccine is available from NHS GPs for people in their 70s.  (Except 75-77 years for now! They will be offered it later.)

Check the Shingles Support Society news on the above link.

There has been a law since 1917 that ensures that information about you – when you visit a sexual health clinic – is kept confidential. The government is proposing to scrap this law and replace it with woolly rules on confidentiality… Read more about this on our blog. Or go straight to the (short) survey organised by BASHH (sexual health doctors’ organisation).

Send the survey on to anyone else you think will help.

Sara Pugh’s baby became ill when she was only a few days old. She was taken to hospital but not treated with antiviral drugs because “No one knew what was wrong.” As a result, the damage to her organs and brain caused this tragic death. This story was reported in the Daily Mirror, 5 Dec 2014.
Continue reading A Baby Died – Newspaper Story Explained

“The conviction was sound” said the judges at the Case Review, requested by the Crown Prosecution Service. Read our press release, May 2014 and our blog.

This is the only case that has ever reached court, regarding herpes.  It happened only because neither David nor his lawyer did anything to find out about herpes.  David just went to court and pleaded guilty. There was no trial, therefore this cannot be said to create a precedent.  Read more about this in the article by Nigel Scott.

In December 2012, the Amgen PR lady informed us that their report re the phase I Immunovex vaccine trial was not ready for publication. However she assured us that Amgen is committed to following pharma’s guidelines which say that the results of every trial involving volunteers (42 in this case) must be made public. This vaccine was created by the Biovex company, and Amgen has bought Biovex. Phase I is the safety stage – and, so far, the vaccine has proved safe. So it will be a commercial decision as to whether a phase II trial is undertaken. The hope is that this jab could prevent genital herpes in those as yet uninfected and also act as a treatment for people who are getting too many genital herpse outbreaks.
Continue reading Vaccine Trial in London

NOW DELETED BY WIKIPEDIA

The history of the HVA – why and how we started up – a bit about the creation of the stigma – you can see it on the Herpes Viruses Association Wikipedia page now! It needs someone to go in and ‘edit’ into the text all the links to other pages of Wiki.  Whilst creating this page, it became obvious that we could add a lot more about how the stigma was invented on the regular herpes simplex page.