The epidemic of kissing may cause 3.7 billion people to be infected with the virus today

Good morning everyone, today is a special day.

, I woke up with sadness and sadness. I came to find a cluster of small blisters on my lips, covered with yellow pulp, like the water of the Yellow River, my tears.

This kind of small herpes is also often called “Liaobu” and “Liaopu”. As soon as the company’s quarterly summary, children’s exam or the stock market plummets, you can see many people with their mouths on their heads. A clump of herpes.

Because it often occurs when anxiety, tension, fatigue, and daily routinedisorder, many people feel It is the performance of “getting hot”.

It’s actually a viral infection, and the culprit is “herpes simplex virus type 1” (HSV-1).

There are two types of common herpes simplex virus causing labial mouth, among which HSV-1 Herpes; HSV-2 is mainly sexually transmitted and causes genital herpes.

Image source: Zhankuhailuo

Most people are infected in infancy or childhood, There will be no obvious symptoms, but once infected, the herpes simplex virus will basically stay in your body and will never leave you for a lifetime.

It’s usually hidden in sensory neurons in the face, and when there’s psychological or physical stress, they can be activated and come out to make waves – yes , is to build bubbles around your lips.

This virus is not simple, with conservative estimates infecting two-thirds of the world’s population. How it became one of the most widespread infectious diseases in the world has remained a mystery and very difficult to track.

So a team of researchers decided to take a closer look at ancient ruins to uncover the source of their popularity.

It turned out that herpes simplex virus type 1 appeared and began to spread about 5,000 years ago. The point is that this timeline coincides with the emergence of new cultural phenomena in human society:

kiss

Picture source: Zhanku Hailuo

Ah this…

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I don’t know what kind of mood it is with, the researchers published the study in the journal Science Advances, a subsidiary of Science, in this romantic season.

4 Revealing the truth with ancient remains

Compared with influenza virus, new coronavirus and other respiratory viruses that can be transmitted through breathing and sneezing, the transmission threshold of herpes simplex virus type 1 is obviously much higher, such as… mouth-to-mouth >

So how did it evolve and achieve mass dissemination? The research team managed to find answers in the ancient remains. They sifted through samples from 3,000 archaeological sites and eventually found HSV-1 in the mouths of four remains spanning a thousand years.

The oldest specimen is a male unearthed in Russia, from the Iron Age 1500 years ago. The closest to us is a young man in the Netherlands who was probably slaughtered when the French attacked his village in 1672.

Image source: phys.org

< p> The other two samples are from young adult males in the late 14th century and adult females who lived in the 6th and 7th centuries. It is not easy to find these four ancient samples. You must know that the earliest virus samples in the past can only be traced back to 1925.

Through these cases with a sufficiently large time span, the research team was able to sequence the viral DNA, analyze the differences between them, and calculate the evolution of the virus based on the mutation rate of the strain timetable.

It turns out that the strain of HSV-1 that plagues us today emerged about 5,000 years ago and gradually replaced earlier strains.

The herpes virus has a long history and has been with us since humans left Africa.

“However,” the researchers said.

“Something happened 5000 years ago…”

“This herpes virus causes more infection than all other types of herpes virus.”

This is probably related to the kissing culture developed by humans. The researchers point out that the earliest known record of kissing is a Bronze Age manuscript from South Asia, and the timelines almost match.

For most of human prehistory, HSV-1 was mainly transmitted vertically between parents and children, and kissing gave it a new, inter-population The way of lateral transfer allows it to spread quickly in the crowd.

It is said that 2000 years ago, the Roman emperor Tiberius tried to ban kissing at official events. To prevent the spread of diseases such as herpes.

Of course, the current conclusions are still debatable. The paper wrote that future research also needs to cover more extensive areas where modern HSV-1 is endemic and mine more ancient genomes, which may further revise our understanding of the pathogen’s evolutionary history.

Some people kiss, some people are lonely, some people grow blister

This article is not to stop everyone from kissing (after all, what happened 5,000 years ago is too late to do anything now), please enjoy yourself.

Talking to Xiaoli, kissing is pleasant; speaking to Dali, kissing is to sample the partner’s histocompatibility gene and test each other from the perspective of immunology Is it a good match for you.

As for those who have no object:

Image source: Made by myself

What about people who have herpes?

Hello, take a look at Health Encyclopedia.

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