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by 8f2ab37a-ed6c
2729 days ago
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I don't think anybody's claiming that having HSV is better than not having HSV, but the fact is that it's incredibly common. It's been with us for millennia and it's not going anywhere until medicine and technology figure out a way to wipe it out. To quote herpes.com stats: > By the time they're teenagers or young adults, about 50% of Americans have HSV-1 antibodies in their blood. By the time they are over age 50, some 80-90% of Americans have HSV-1 antibodies. And this is HSV1 alone. You add HSV2 to it and, I believe according to some stats, you end up with 80% of the world population having some variation of it. Stigmatizing 4 out of 5 people in the world makes no sense and is helping nobody. You can't avoid getting it, unless you never interact with another human being, and treating others like broken goods until you become one too (because it IS only a matter of time) is inhumane. On a related note, I believe the majority of the stigma comes from HSV2, which I'm sure has much more to do with sexual morality than with medicine. Nobody blinks an eye if you have its oral counterpart, you go to CVS and buy a Blistex. However, if you have the genital version, now THAT is a problem. Same virus, vastly different reaction. |
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> It's not life altering in any way besides the fact that HSV2 has such a strong stigma <snip>...
It is potentially quite life-altering, and you may agree with me after you're over 60 years old. If you instead asserted "it hasn't been life-altering in any way so far besides..." then I wouldn't have replied at all.
Adding a persistent genital herpes outbreak to six months of shingles in old age qualifies as life-altering in my book.
Your comment comes across as if everyone should get over it and not exclude partners infected with genital herpes from their intimate lives, that this stigma exists just because it's associated with sex.
Nobody wants to be infected with any form of the herpes virus, the variants of which will cumulatively add life-altering complications when your immune system deteriorates. Genital herpes is appropriately highly stigmatized because it has the most potential for effective prevention through avoidance.
Choice of sexual partner is already culturally accepted as a highly discrimatory exercise, it basically goes unnoticed for the uninfected population to exclude those infected with genital herpes from their sex lives, it's not like the uninfected end up without sufficient available partners as a result. It has zero impact on their daily goings on. Compare that to the futility of stigmatizing Chickenpox however, the difference seems obvious.