My sister has just been diagnosed with Herpes. She is trying to figure out who gave it to her. How long after exposure would you get an outbreak?

My sister has just been diagnosed with Herpes. She is trying to figure out who gave it to her. How long after exposure would you get an outbreak?

This is a tricky virus. Some people will have the inital outbreak any where from 2 days after exposure on... meanwhile others will go years and years without any signs or symptoms. Just because of that factor it is hard to ever tell where you had gotten it from. Although normally if it is a new infection if you ask to have the IgG type specific blood test done and it comes out negative or a low positive then you know that the virus was accquired within the past 3-4 months (you can probably go based on this if she had a culture done to determine she is positive)..also I would get retested with the blood test in 4 months and if the positive is high then you know it was within that 3-4 month period in the begining.

Honestly though. if she wants to tell someone to have them get tested I would suggest the last person she has been with and just keep her head up and move on from there. Just make new partners aware ...also she should have it typed.. the reason I say this is because type 1 tends to have less outbreaks and less transmission then type 2.

Hope this helps! :):)