Alie Ward

So if you are prone to herpes outbreaks, including like cold sores or shingles or below the waist inconveniences, you can look in your supplement cabinet to see if L-arginine is something you're taking a lot of, or you can consider some L-lysine.

But also remember, I'm a podcast host.

I'm not your doctor, like even a little bit.

You know, listener questions and just general discourse.

I feel like herpes is the one that people are like the most stigma, the most fear around.

And also from what I understand, like really common.

Can you break down herpes simplex number one and two?

What can you get where in the body?

Again, in case you missed it, if you get cold sores on your mouth sometimes from stress or other triggers, that's probably the variety of HSV-1.

Now, herpes 2, it's a different species and it affects up to 20% of the population.

Those with vaginas are almost twice as susceptible to catching it, which sucks.

And it's also very evolutionarily clever.

It ducks out of sight of your immune system.

It hides in your nerve cells.

And when your immune system is weak or you encounter certain stressors or triggers, the virus hops on the express train of your neurons, long axons, right to the skin where it causes mayhem.

So which skin destinations?

And let's take a peek at the 2022 JAMA paper, Viral Shedding One Year Following the First Episode Genital HSV-1 Infection.

And this paper found that people who had genital outbreaks of herpes simplex number one shed the virus about 12% of the days two months past their initial outbreak.

Now, nearly a year later, that went down to 7% of days.

But that genital shedding could be asymptomatic.