herpes spreading to hands?

[concerned1]

hi everyone, I'm new here and kind of nervous, so I apologize if this has been discussed before, but I need answers.

so, I ended up booking up with a girl that has genital herpes. afterwards, she ended up telling me afterwards that she was currently broken out. it was dark when we were together, so I had no idea. I only used my hands, and washed them immediately after, but I have rough cuticles so I'm worried that I'm at risk for infection. with her being broken out, how much of a risk am I at here?

thank you for any and all help you can give me. I'm really nervous and just looking for guidance.

[optimist]

@concerned1 I'm glad you asked this question because it's something I had never considered and it prompted me to do some research just now. It looks like a herpetic infection of the finger is somewhat rare with 2-5 of 100,000 people in the U.S. being infected (by contrast, something like 80,000 of 100,000 are infected orally). The majority of herpetic finger infections are caused by HSV1. Health care workers are at particular risk because they are exposed on an ongoing basis. Children who aggressively chew their fingers are apparently also at risk, as are people with compromised immune systems.

 

So my sense is that it is not impossible, but it is unlikely the scenario you described would result in infection. Keep in mind a significant portion of the population has genital herpes and most of them don't know it, so people are unknowingly taking the risk you described all the time and very rarely developing herpetic lesions on their fingers.

 

I hope that puts your mind at ease a little, though I'm sure you'll feel better when a couple weeks have passed with no symptoms.

 

 

 

[concerned1]

thank you optimist. I really appreciate you looking into the matter and trying to put me at ease. like you said, I'll (hopefully) feel better in a couple weeks, but this will help a lot in the mean time.

it means a lot.

 

[Sil88]

This happened to me, but I also read it is quite rare. First sign was - I had a black patch appear on the affected cuticle to begin with, a couple of weeks after the event.. I think my chances were higher though because I actually had torn cuticles and she had only recently caught the virus. In general it's probably very unlikely.