The same type of herpes virus causes chickenpox in children and shingles in adults.
It all starts with a childhood infection. The herpes virus flies through the air, spreads like tuberculosis and goes down the throat.
There we have a whole scattering of large and small tonsils, inside of which are lymphocytes.
And now the virus gets into these lymphocytes and, like a passenger in public transport, goes to travel on them through the body.
Lymphocytes quickly taxi down the highway, which we call the bloodstream, and scatter in all directions.
The last stop will be in the skin. There, a crowd of viruses are dumping from buses and having a picnic. The fun ends with a cloud of blisters all over the skin, including the scalp.
Then the viruses that walk up are sent to spend the night. They find the endings of the nerves in the skin and climb along them to the nerve nodes closer to the spinal cord and brain.
We can say that on this the large circle of herpes zoster travel is closed.
In nerve cells, a mischievous virus will live under the supervision of immunity. There he will no longer be allowed to misbehave.
Sometimes immunity fails. The virus inside the nerve nodes collects the manat and rushes along the nerve fibers back to the picnic in the skin.
And again it all ends in bubbles.
It is clear that the immune system went wild when it released herpes zoster from the nerve nodes, so it begins to curry favor and, under the hot hand, still gnaws at the nerve nodes themselves. From this, in patients with herpes zoster, an incomprehensible exhausting pain appears.
So it turns out that shingles makes a full turn in our body even in childhood, and then immunity sometimes allows it to make a foray into the skin. This is another half turn.
