I don’t have facts here (and I’m guessing very few people do). I’m just using my general knowledge of how these things work (I’m a grad student in biochemistry/molecular biology) to connect dots. There certainly could be some new kind of treatment that works by a different mechanism that I’m not aware of, but it seems to me that that’s pretty unlikely.

it only took ballin’ one.

Mine is more or less in remission now. As I understand it, most people who contract herpes get one outbreak and that’s it. I beat the odds on that one, though. Unfortunately, at some point I passed it along to the missus. I contracted it well before we met; I informed her about it when we started dating; I thought I was careful not to pass it along, but obviously we weren’t careful enough; and now she still gets the occasional breakout. When it happens, it hurts some and it itches some. But again, like the cancer I noted above, it’s not the end of the world. I can remember, there was a time when people thought getting herpes WAS the end of the world. Then along came AIDS, and made a lot of us glad we only had herpes.

No, you can’t get it from shaking my hand or sharing a joint*, so don’t worry about that.

*—I don’t do that anymore, not since I woke up one night doing about 50 mph on the Parkway East after a party, but there was a time.