You have tem if you have been exposed to herpes. They are in your blood and are supposed to help protect you from further infections/outbreaks, but don't seem to work too well for most people. That is--they do not protect you from reinfection in most cases, even from reinfecting yourself.
What they do is keep the rest of your ob's from being as bad as your primary. And if you are one of the lucky ones without ob's, then they are the little critters to thank.
Here's the thing...you don't need someone else's antibodies. Your own will cut it just fine. The problem is, the herpes viruses have developed techniques to "hide" themselves or "make themselves" invisible to your antibodies when it is in the dormant state. Only when you have an OB is the virus out there for the antibodies to take care of it. So it's not that you don't have enough antibodies or that they aren't doing a good job, it's that herpes is hiding from them most of the time and is protected when it just sits in the ganglia.
heh backpacker yeah that would happen if you're lucky...if you're not, you might recognize other antibodies as foreign and begin attacking them, leading to a pretty severe reaction.
I think antibodies are kind of oversold to be honest! According to the doctors, my antibodies should have stopped me getting HSV1 genitally after having it orally since I was a young child, but they didn't!
Yeah, they don't work well for herpes, do they? But don't put antibodies down too much--they still protect us from killers like diphtheria, tetanus, polio, etc. Herpes is just one tricky little scoundrel.
