Why Is Everyone Getting Shingles?
Among young people and around the world, rates of this painful illness are mysteriously trending upward
The virus that causes shingles is cunning. It lies dormant inside the human body — often hiding in the nerve cells of the spinal column or the brain. Then, after decades of inactivity, it can remerge as a painful, blister-pocked skin rash.
“The way the virus is quiescent for decades and then reactivates — it’s unusual, but it makes sense from the perspective of the virus’ survival,” says Rafael Harpaz, MD, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC’s Division of Viral Diseases. Back when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer communities, Harpaz explains, viruses that depended on human hosts would have died out quickly if they infected everyone en masse. By lying in wait, shingles allows new generations of carriers to be born.
Harpaz has spent years studying the bug. A 2016 study of his in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases helped shine a spotlight on a curious phenomenon: For at least the past 60 years, rates of shingles have been climbing. Compared to the period from 1945 to 1949, when 0.76 people per 1,000 developed shingles, rates climbed to 3.15 per 1,000 by the period from 2000 to 2007, his study found.
