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• Posted December 11, 2024

Genital Herpes Affects 1 in 5 Younger Adults Worldwide

Genital herpes is widespread the world round among younger adults, with more than 846 million people living with the lifelong sexually transmitted infection, a new review finds.

About 1 in 5 people younger than 50 live with a genital herpes infection, researchers reported Dec. 10 in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections.

Even worse, more than 200 million people ages 15 to 49 likely had at least one outbreak of herpes sores and ulcers in 2020.

“Herpes simplex virus infections are widely prevalent in all global regions, leading to a significant burden of genital ulcer disease with repercussions on psychosocial, sexual and reproductive health, neonatal transmission, and HIV transmission,” concluded the research team led by senior researcher Katherine Looker, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the University of Bristol in the U.K.

Although rare, herpes can be passed to newborns by their mothers, an infection that often proves fatal, the researchers noted.

Herpes also triples a person’s risk of contracting HIV, the study added.

Despite this, hardly any programs exist for herpes prevention and control, even in wealthy nations, the researchers noted.

This is likely due to a lack of new treatments and vaccines that could control the spread of herpes.

“Available prevention [methods], including condoms and antiviral therapy, are insufficient to control infection transmission and have, at best, had a modest population impact in reducing incidence rates,” the researchers wrote.

“There is a need for herpes simplex virus prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines as a strategic approach to control transmission and to curb the disease and economic burdens of these infections,” the team added in a journal news release.

For the study, researchers pooled data from studies published up to March 2022 on the spread of herpes. The team then used mathematical modeling to estimate just how widespread the STI had become.

The data indicate that 26 million people under 50 became newly infected with herpes simplex 2 in 2020, joining an estimated 520 million who already carry the infection.

That means that more than 13% of people in that age group carry herpes simplex 2, researchers said.

Data also showed that an estimated 17 million people under 50 acquired a herpes simplex 1 infection genitally in 2020, joining 376 million already infected.

Herpes simplex 1 primarily is spread in childhood by mouth contact, but is increasingly being spread through sexual contact at older ages, the researchers noted.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on genital herpes.

SOURCE: BMJ Group, news release, Dec. 10, 2024