How long can the cold sore virus lay dormant

But stress can compromise the immune system. Mehta and his team believe that microgravity, cosmic radiation, and the extreme G forces experienced during launch among other factors like confined life in a spacecraft and disruptions in circadian rhythms encourage an increase in hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which suppress the immune system.

The factors that keep dormant viruses at bay are weakened, sometimes for up to 60 days after spaceflight. We constantly shed viral cells from our body through fluids like urine and saliva, and higher rates showing up in bodily fluids indicate a virus is active. For this particular study, Mehta and his team studied blood, urine, and saliva samples of astronauts who had completed space shuttle missions between 10 and 16 days in space and stays on the International Space Station typically over days in space.

They found that four of the eight herpes viruses known to infect humans reactivated and resurfaced as a result of spaceflight. Specifically, 53 percent of astronauts who underwent space shuttle missions and 61 percent of astronauts who had gone on long stays on the ISS were shedding herpes viruses at much higher rates through their saliva and urine. The researchers turned to mice with latent HSV-1 infections to see if these same microRNAs existed in the nerve cells of living, infected animals.

By chasing the virus from hiding, the scientists hope to make it more vulnerable to drugs that target active, replicating HSV The scientists say their findings may also be relevant to other latent herpesviruses, including the varicella zoster virus, which causes chickenpox but sometimes reemerges as shingles, or herpes simplex virus-2, which causes genital herpes.

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Your email only if you want to be contacted back. Recent research has actually found that the virus can be transmitted between blisterings , which makes sense for how people who never experience symptoms can be passing it along. Unfortunately, it is a risk. You can also get genital herpes if you have oral herpes — while there's a strain of the virus that is most likely to show up around your mouth HSV-1 , 40 percent of genital herpes cases are this strain and not the classic genital strain, which is HSV This is important for two reasons: First off, it means that if your sexual partner also has herpes let's say they have it orally also and they go down on you, you can get it genitally even though you already have it orally.

It also means you can give it to yourself genitally if, for instance, you lick your fingers and then masturbate. This is called autoinoculation, and it's pretty rare but it does happen — usually during your first outbreak, which is the most intense. You can read more about that here. The reason the tingly feeling is showing up in the same place every time is because you get sores in the site where the virus entered your system when you got it.

When that happens, there are lots of things you can take to shorten the length of an outbreak.