Herpes simplex virus type I can cause bouts of cold sores, blindness and potentially lethal encephalitis when it reawakens from a quiescent state in the nerve cells it infects.

An experiment to see if treating genital herpes with a common drug could dramatically reduce susceptibility to HIV infection failed - a shocking setback for researchers hoping to find a pill that would slow the spread of the AIDS epidemic.

There’s a high probability that people who are prone to herpes simplex virus (HSV) outbreaks can inherit that susceptibility through their genes, University of Utah researchers report in a new study.

University of Pennsylvania researchers have uncovered an important step in how herpes simplex virus, HSV-1, uses cooperating proteins found on its outer coat to gain entry into healthy cells and infect them. Further, the study’s authors say, they have demonstrated the effectiveness of monitoring these protein interactions using biomolecular complementation.

Mice with chronic herpes virus infections can better resist the bacterium that causes plague and a bacterium that causes one kind of food poisoning, researchers report in this week's Nature.