Shingles

My sister-in-law has shingles. Apparently they just appeared, and she now has the painful rash across her side, which is a typical symptom of the condition. For those of you who have no idea about what it is, the wiki of the condition is here. As you can see, it is actually a Herpes type virus. A remnant from Chickenpox that no doubt many of us would have had vaccines for as children, though depending on which country you grew up in, that might have never happened LOL. My father also had a case of shingles a few years back when his body was weak and low on the immune system, and he found it virtually impossible to sleep lying down due to the sensitivity and pain of the rash around his abdomen, and thus ended up sleeping in a sitting position on our living room lounge.

These virii are nasty bastards, hiding dorman in our ganglions and what not, where you can't really dig them out (well, you could if you wanted to be a permanent vegetable.... with no spinal function), wanting to peek their ugly ugly heads out when you least want them to appear, though I guess diagnostically, they can be useful in telling you and warning you that your immune system has gone to crap and that you should rest up and recooperate as part of getting rid of them...

I did some TEM work as part of my Master degree, and one of the things we had to do was find and image Herpes virus from wombat. Yes, wombat. These little nasties infect human and animal alike. Unfortunately for animal, most of them can't really communicate it to us that they would like anti-viral drugs to take the pain, and they probably pack it in somewhere in the wilderness and or transfer the virus to other animals through contact.

This is what they look like in wombat. Note the scale bar, this is how small they are....... yes, nm is nanometers, E10^-9 meters...

They have what is called the 'fried egg' appearance which is characteristic of the virus when attempting to find/locate/image them. Fried eggs are nice. Herpes, not nice.