Blogs / 80beats

The French oyster industry has been devastated by the abrupt die-off of juvenile oysters; this summer, oyster farmers watched in dismay as between 40 and 100 percent of their young oysters were wiped out. Now researchers say they’ve found the cause of the mysterious blight: The oysters have been infected with a herpes virus for which there is no known cure.

A warm winter and wet spring left the young oysters especially vulnerable to Oyster Herpesvirus type 1, they say. They matured too fast, feeding on abundant plankton, the scientists say. [French oyster expert Tristan Renault says] that “the animal has been using up a lot of energy developing its genitalia and using a lot less to defend itself” [BBC News].

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Odds are, you have it. By the age of 40, nearly 90 percent of adults in the United States have been exposed to the herpes simplex virus-1 (HSV1) that causes cold sores. Not everyone who has the virus lurking in their body will have symptoms, but those who do will be annoyed for life by unexpected lip blisters. But now the secret of how the cold sore virus manages to persist for a lifetime in the human body may have been cracked [BBC News], and researchers say their findings may point the way towards a treatment that could kill the virus once and for all.

The virus is a difficult target. When a cold sore appears, it’s easily treatable with a drug that kills the replicating virus, but that drug can’t get to the latent versions of the virus that are hiding within nerve cells and waiting to cause the next eruption. Until now, research has generally concentrated on keeping HSV1 inactive — and preventing cold sores from ever showing up. But [Duke University] researchers took the opposite tack: figuring out precisely how to switch the virus from latency to its active stage. That’s important, says lead author Dr. Bryan Cullen, professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke, “because unless you activate the virus, you can’t kill it” [Time].

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When an experiment finds out that a treatment doesn’t work as expected and that a cherished hypothesis just isn’t right, it’s not considered as newsworthy as an amazingly effective treatment that sparkles with potential. But the negative findings are just as important in their contributions to medical knowledge.

In that category, a new study dismisses the theory that treating herpes reduces patients’ risk of HIV infection, a strategy that was believed to hold promise. Researchers wrote in a commentary: It is time to reassess the hypothesis and to adjust prevention policy accordingly [The Lancet, subscription required].

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