TARGETING SHINGLES

YOU CAN PREVENT OR REDUCE THE SEVERITY OF SHINGLES, A LITTLE-KNOWN BUT DEBILITATING AILMENT, WITH TIMELY VACCINATION AND TREATMENT

- Sonali Acharjee

Till he got shingles last year, Pune-based Sohil Kapadia had never even heard of the disease. At 68, the retired bank manager was a healthy person with no history of any other illness. He had never experienced anything so debilitating—not even Covid. “It was like my whole body was on fire,” says Kapadia. “For six months, I couldn’t even feed myself because of the severe ache in my nerves.” What worries him more is that even after this episode, he could still get shingles all over again.

A viral infection, shingles is caused by the varicella-zoster virus—the same virus that causes chickenpox. “After you have had chickenpox, the virus stays in the body for the rest of your life,” explains Dr Sandeep Budhiraja, medical director, Max Healthcare, “and years later, it can reactivate and travel around your nerve pathways to the skin, causing a painful rash that usually looks like a stripe of blisters around the right or left side of your torso.” That’s how shingles, medically known as herpes zoster, gets its colloquial names in India: Nagin, Brahmsutri and Janeu.