Few people who have had a bout of shingles ever forget the blisters’ pain and rash that erupt, like so much wildfire, along the nerves under their skin. This pain lasts not minutes or hours but days and sometimes weeks. Even more ghastly, some patients continue to suffer from a complication called postherpetic neuralgia, whose …
Shingles is a viral infection that affects a nerve and the surrounding skin, caused by reactivation of varicella-zoster, the chickenpox virus. After varicella zoster causes chickenpox, mostly in childhood, it remains dormant in the body for life. The reactivation of the dormant virus is what causes shingles. Therefore, anybody who had chickenpox in their childhood …
Most of us have heard about the medical condition, shingles, that causes great pain and suffering for many people later in life. The virus is linked to the contraction of chickenpox earlier in life following the varicella-zoster virus lying dormant in your body for several years before becoming active once more. The risk of the …
Shingles, (herpes zoster) is an infection usually associated with people over fifty. When someone gets chickenpox, typically younger people, the disease takes about three to five weeks to heal, but the virus survives in the cells. Later in life, often many years later, the dormant chickenpox virus reactivates and strikes again. Only this time, it …
Shingles and chickenpox are itchy, painful, and cause an immense amount of discomfort for those they affect. It is tempting to call them the same, given their similarities. However, they are two very different illnesses.
