Natural Herpes Treatment

People who have herpes but don’t know it can still be passing along the infection - or “shedding” it, Reuters news service reports. One in six adults in the U.S. has genital herpes, making screening for the disease very important. Genital herpes not only causes painful blisters but it can increase your risk of contracting HIV/AIDS.

“The people who are symptomatic are really the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Christine Johnston, of the University of Washington in Seattle. “We are not having any impact on the epidemic by ignoring it.”

In Johnson’s study, researchers followed 498 people who had antibodies in their blood against genital herpes. This shows they had all been infected, even though about one in six never had any symptoms. Although it is unclear how much virus is needed to infect someone else, Johnston said, the amount of virus shed in the absence of sores was the same for people even without symptoms. Doctors recommend frank conversations with your partner about herpes.

In a new report, scientists revealed a previously unknown way  the immune system attacks infections, a finding that offers a new approach to treating diseases caused by viruses.

“Doctors have plenty of antibiotics to fight bacterial infections but few antiviral drugs. Although these are early days, and we don’t yet know whether all viruses are cleared by this mechanism, we are excited that our discoveries may open multiple avenues for developing new antiviral drugs,” said Dr Leo James, leader of the study at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

The body fights infections by unleashing antibodies that stick to viruses as they circulate in the bloodstream. For many years, scientists working on immunity generally believed this made it harder for viruses to get inside healthy cells and spread the illness through the body.

But the new study has shown that for many viruses,  antibodies follow the invader inside the cell and co-ordinate an immune attack from within.

Immunologists once believed  that antibodies went to work only outside cells. Once a virus had invaded a cell, it was thought to be too late for the immune system to do anything.

Viruses are responsible for influenza, the common cold, smallpox, chickenpox, shingles, herpes, polio, rabies, Ebola, hanta fever, Aids and various forms of cancer.

The new study shows that once inside an infected cell, antibodies attract a protein called TRIM21. This turns on the cell’s equivalent of a waste disposal machine, a large cluster of proteins called a proteasome. The proteasome  latches on to TRIM21 and goes to work, dismantling the virus piece by piece, often before the virus has a chance to cause harm. The discovery, which is reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could pave the way for a new generation of antiviral drugs that fight infections by supercharging the body’s own defences.

Future treatments based on this research are  expected only to work against a class of viruses that do not shed their protein coats when they invade healthy cells. Those that do would leave the attached antibodies outside the cells, and so not trigger the cell’s own immune attack.

Conventional medical practices normally prescribe Acyclovir ointment or other topical medications to treat herpes outbreaks.

Recently some new research emerged indicating that nature may provide an alternative solution. This remedy supposedly works faster than any of the conventional  mainstream treatments. I will explain further on why I use the word “supposedly”.

For some believers in natural cures, honey has long been regarded as  a natural wound healer and infection fighter. An unnamed researcher treated patients with Acyclovir for one herpes outbreak and honey for another.  Overall healing time with honey was 43 percent better than with Acyclovir for sores on the lips and 59 percent better for genital sores. This news sounds good, but I take this report  with a fair amount of skepticism.

This news report does not contain many details, such as the name of the researcher, the number of patients involved,  references to any peer reviews of the study or if this study had any official sanction, so for me, this puts the article I discovered on the Internet  in question. When you are suffering from herpes it is difficult sometimes remain a little skeptical when hope is presented, but there are real clinical studies of alternative herpes treatments on record and the hopeful investigator needs to sort herpes simplex fact from fiction.

I personally would experiment with honey on a herpes lesion if I were curious enough, but would never expect this “natural treatment” to prevent spreading the infection. A herpes sufferer must remain vigilant to never infect another person.