DOCTOR, I HAVE LIP FEVER!
- On March 30, 2017
Summer has arrived, and with it, the good weather inviting you to go to terraces, parks and beaches, to enjoy the good life that this kind of weather brings. Spain is a country privileged by its climate, including all the areas that enjoy having more than 300 days of sunshine a year. However, that friendly sun, which represents our lovely golden summer days, we must be wary of its impact on us. Since our clinic is located in a privileged area of the Costa Cálida, San Pedro del Pinatar, many patients come to my dental clinic in the summer, saying, “D., I have lip fever”. What the patients often call “fever”, most of the time is an injury caused by a virus that attacks more than eighty percent of the world population, called Herpes Simple Virus 1 (HSV1), attacking any part of the body from the waist up, regularly face and lips, creating such a relevant entity that it has been renamed with an informal and colloquial term: cold sores, which can usually be quite annoying.
Once a person has been contaminated, the virus remains living in the neuronal ganglia. In other words, it exist in the root of some nerves near the mouth, and it becomes active when we have low defences, stressful situations, exposure to intense cold, fevers and exposure to UV rays, having reappearance stages throughout someone’s life.
During the summer times, when we weaken our personal care to better enjoy the vacations, we have to take into account that solar radiation (containing a percentage of UVA) can activate the virus and “wake it up”, producing what is commonly known as “fever”. Herpes Simplex Virus has a fairly high potential of contamination through saliva, reason why you should be more careful and take the necessary precautions not to contaminate other people, especially children since the first virus infection can be quite serious for them.
Fortunately, proper care to avoid or space out their appearances is very simple and does not go beyond the usage of a sunscreen with an index between 30 and 50 proof for the face and lips and lipsticks to protect against the cold in winter.