Cold sore transmission: carrier to carrier?

Factual Questions
1

Person A has herpes simplex virus and has an active cold sore/fever blister. Person B also has herpes (as does 80% of America, by some estimates) but no active outbreaks at the moment, nor has B had any for several years.

A and B kiss, and B develops a cold sore/fever blister soon thereafter. It would seem to me that as a herpes carrier already, B wouldn’t be susceptible to an outbreak from contact with another herpes carrier.

Question: As B already has herpes, is the cold sore development a result of the kiss with another herpes carrier? Or is it just coincidence, or perhaps even psychosomatically induced? Are there maybe different strains of the herpes virus that B just wasn’t used to, hence the outbreak?

Thanks, all.

2

I’m not a MD, so take this answer with a grain of salt. :slight_smile: The herpes virus (when dormant) resides in a ganglia ( the cervical ganglia, I believe). It does not cause any symptoms until it escapes from the ganglia, usually caused by stress. If the virus is implanted on one’s lips (by reason of a kiss, for example), the virus is now in the bloodstream and can cause symptoms.

3

Note that there are substrains of Herpes so in principle one can get infected by more than one substrain. But I don’t know how likely this actually is.

Induced by stress not doubt has a much higher probability going for it.