How to Unplug Your Zoster
What do Roseanne Barr, Robin Williams, and Richard Nixon all have in common?
Alliteration of the letter “R?”
Yes, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
They all said things that made people laugh?
Well, not all of them meant to do that, but that’s not it either. The correct answer is behind door number three. All of them had shingles in their lifetimes.1 Shingles, as you may know, is a different presentation of the virus (varicella zoster) that causes chickenpox. After the childhood infection, or vaccination, the virus becomes one of many passenger viruses that hangout in our bodies until we die. Under most circumstances, zoster is a reasonably polite house guest, requiring only the looming threat of your immune system to elicit good behavior.
However, due to physical inceptions that are not fully understood (stress, injury, even repeated severe sunburns may be related)2, zoster sometimes decides to throw your years of good hospitality out the window and reassert itself as shingles. The “cobblestone” appearance of its signature rash lends both the name and the heap of personal misery for which it is known. Descriptions range from “itchy,” to “agonizing” to florid metaphors that I won’t detail here.
As if these problems weren’t enough, a recent article by the American Heart Association calls attention to some extra baggage that zoster has been quietly dragging through our indignant population. Varicella zoster is the only virus that has been shown to replicate inside the cardiovascular system and cause vasculopathy. We might debate the long-term prognosis of that, but a 2022 study in JAMA (n=205,000) found a 30% increase in risk of cardiovascular event after shingles, and a 38% increase in stroke risk.
Those stats are hard to debate.
And even harder to ignore.
Poor cardiovascular health is the number one killer of US citizens annually3, and it has been for many years. For an example close to home, our flow meters can be used for countless procedures, from liver transplant to aneurysm surgery, but they are used for cardiovascular procedures more frequently than all others combined. So the list of worldwide cardiac threats grows longer each year, and now we find out that the beady-eyed virus behind chickenpox has been lending a hand all along.
Perhaps we can’t yet wipe this virulent little hitchhiker from existence, but maybe we can shut the door before it arrives. The shingles vaccine is more than 90% effective, according to the CDC.4 So a concerted citizens’ effort could make more than 90% of the population zoster-proof. A virus cannot survive if it runs out of hosts in which to replicate. And to snowclone my grandfather’s eternal aspersion towards poisonous snakes…
“That’s the good kind of virus. The dead kind.”
Thanks for reading,
Transonic Systems, Inc
The Measure of Better Results
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