How dangerous can shingles on the neck become?
Shingles on the head – you should keep this in mindShingles is a viral disease. An infection with the varicella zoster virus triggers the disease. The disease is particularly dangerous for older people.
In principle, the disease can occur anywhere on the body, but in most cases only on one side of the body. Shingles can also occur on the neck. Complications are always superinfections.
Bacteria can settle on the injured skin. Furthermore, the special proximity to the face must be taken into account. The virus can attack the facial nerves or the eye. This can lead to serious consequences for the patient. Therefore, shingles on the neck should be treated as soon as possible.
Is shingles contagious?
Although shingles may look very infectious, it is only so under certain conditions: First of all, a good 98% of the population already carries the shingles virus (varicella virus). By the age of 40, this is exactly the percentage who have already become familiar with the virus – in the form of chickenpox. Anyone who has already had chickenpox in their youth or has been vaccinated against chickenpox has nothing to fear, because they are already infected with the virus.
Chickenpox is highly contagious and is transmitted by air. Since a chickenpox infection is much less severe in adolescence than in adulthood, it used to be common practice to bring uninfected children into close contact with children who were just going through a chickenpox infection in order to infect the uninfected child as well. What sounds relatively barbaric nowadays had the advantage that the chickenpox infection was over for both children and could not come back – because: You can only get chickenpox once in your life.
While chickenpox spreads via the airways, in the form of droplet infections, shingles is far less contagious. Only the contents of the rice grain-sized blisters are contagious – but only for people who have never had a chickenpox infection. The background is that both chickenpox and shingles are caused by the varicella vrius.
So why don’t we all have shingles all the time when 98% of people already carry the virus? This is because our immune system can normally suppress the virus with ease. Only when our immune system is exposed to heavy stress do the varicella viruses sense their chance and spread, resulting in shingles.
Burden for our immune system occurs during stress, immunosuppressive therapy, colds, or after transplantation. Only in these cases does shingles really break out. Moreover, if you do not carry the virus in your body, you would first have to come into direct contact with the contents of the vesicles of a sick person. In summary, the risk of infection is very low.
