One of the more widespread sexually transmitted diseases out there today is herpes. Twenty percent of adult Americans currently have this disease and there is currently no cure for it. Despite this, in recent years, the FDA has approved some medication that can fight off the virus and help prevent or reduce the severity of outbreaks. These are acyclovir, famciclovir and valacylovir. These drugs are called antivirals are also useful for reducing the length and discomforts of initial outbreaks.
These drugs, when taken very early at the onset of symptoms can actually stop an episode of an outbreak from happening. When these medications are taken during an outbreak, these act to cut down on the discomfort that you feel by reducing the severity of the symptoms even if these drugs do not always work in completely stopping an outbreak from occurring.
There are two ways that are used in order to accurately diagnose a herpes infection. The first is by doing a viral culture of cells swabbed from a lesion that appears during the outbreak. The other method is by done by doing a blood test.
During a viral culture, the doctor takes a swab and wipes it against a lesion so to gather virus cells. He places this in a special solution and sends the sample out to a lab that will do the analyzing of the culture. This will determine whether the virus was caused by the HSV-1 or the HSV-2 virus and this can help the person know how often they can expect an outbreak to happen.
Another way to diagnose the presence of a herpes infection is thru a blood test. These are also done to know whether or not there is a herpes infection even when there are no symptoms yet. This method works because soon after a person is infected, the body will start to produce antibodies to fight off the herpes virus. This is also a good way to determine whether the virus is from the herpes simplex 1 or the herpes simplex 2 although this will not tell you if the infection is of the oral or genital kind.
There are a lot of blood tests available on the market today but the older ones are not very reliable and can be expensive. The newer tests are cheaper and more accurate but there is no way of knowing what kind of test is being conducted unless you ask.
There are more articles to discover. Please see my page on Symptoms of Herpes and my page that helps people cope with herpes symptoms.
