At our annual meeting, we had a talk from Rational Vaccine CEO Agustin Fernandez on how he was involved.
“I get facial cold sores. I probably caught them as a child but as an adult they suddenly got really bad: I was lucky if I had a week between recurrences. The pain on my face and around my eye was terrible. Even high doses of antivirals did not work for me. I literally tried everything.
Then I read online that Dr William (Bill) Halford, a professor at a university in Southern Illinois, had created a vaccine.
In recent years, I’ve noticed something interesting about one aciclovir pill. If I had a bad night’s sleep, a particularly stressful day, or some other event that had triggered outbreaks in the past, I would occasionally take a single 400 mg or 800 mg dose of aciclovir. More often than not, the outbreak never seemed to develop.
How to use ‘Cognitive Defusion’ – this means ‘how to detach from your thoughts’. Or ‘defuse them’, like defusing a bomb!
Cognitive defusion is a psychological technique used in therapy to help people move away from their usual overthinking patterns. So many of the people who call our helpline say they are worriers, catastrophisers, or that they “keep spiralling”…
If this is something that you recognise, read on for a very short overview…
This magazine has a long report from the medical conference for sexual health doctors: our director was given a bursary to attend.
We include pages of medical research in each issue of the magazine. there is plenty of herpes simplex research going on; new facts about herpes simplex treatments and herpes vaccines. In this magazine:
About half the magazine is medical news
We have an article on herpes stigma by two psychologists – along with our comments.
Building your confidence at the next Assurance Day – what was said about the last one.
See articles from past Spheres here. See an example of the full magazine here.
Back copies of Sphere
You can also order back copies of Sphere. For instance you can read a talk on the psychology of having herpes simplex given by Dr John Green on “Getting your head around it”.
He made us laugh! A total of ten pages printed in two successive journals. We print an almost verbatim report of his talk including the question and answer session and his views on the (non-issue) of the Crown Prosecution Service’s guidelines on ‘deliberate infection with an STI’. His attitude was that if he was called as an expert witness, he would use the court to ridicule the idea of attempting to bring a case about this. But he does not expect, ever, to see a person in the dock for transmitting herpes simplex. He laughed and said something about how you cannot call herpes simplex ‘a serious condition’. His whole talk was very amusing and the report is sprinkled with [LAUGHTER] notes so that readers can feel what it was like to be in the room. (They are in SPHEREs 21/3 and 21/4.)
Sign up to get the magazine sent to you every three months by post or by email. Subscribers can order all the back copies for just £25 – it’s an education!
The UK Crown Prosecution Service says there is no need to disclose , but don’t lie if asked. That applies to any STI or HIV. And don’t be malicious or reckless.
A case in Australia in May 2026 hit the headlines when a man was sentenced to 13 months. He did lie when he was directly asked about STIs. And he had unprotected sex with the partner, so he could indeed be called reckless.
The Rational Vaccine is now available in Roatán, Honduras, and in Munich, Germany. See also the update on vaccine in the earlier post, below…
RVx is a therapeutic vaccine which aims to treat herpes simplex types 1 and 2. It is for people getting too many recurrences. Experience so far has shown that, after the first injection, you can expect to cease having nerve pains, and that you will have 50 percent fewer recurrences. After the course of three injections, some people cease having recurrences altogether and for the others, recurrences are very much less frequent. (Scientists would never risk saying “they stop altogether.”)
Until you have symptoms, you are considered not to have the virus. There is no test – apart from one place in the USA – that is suitable for people who are do not have visible sores, ulcers or lesions.
Dr Jan Clarke’s statements: she is a top sexual health consultant. She ran the “patient and public panel” for the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV (BASHH) for years. She says:
For many years we have been reporting on the research that finds that people with facial infection who alsohave a variant of the APOE4 gene are more likely than others to develop Alzheimer’s disease. (This is not relevant if you have it genitally. And people with genital infection are very unlikely to ever catch a new facial infection.) Only a tiny number of people have this gene variant – and anyway it is only ‘more likely to’ not ‘will’ develop.
