Silent genital herpes simplex infection among asymptomatic female college students

Abstract

A STUDY examined the risk for silent genital herpes simplex infection in a systematic sample of a population known to have above average prevalence and incidence of clinical infections. Using virus isolation and identification for diagnosis, validating the technique by achieving com plete agreement between clinical diagnoses of herpes infection and laboratory confirmation during the study period and comparing the results with those obtained from conventional cervical cytology, no instances of silent infection were found. Routine screening of high risk populations for silent genital herpes simplex infection may be conducted adequately by cervical cytology. 23% of this population of young women gave a history of recurrent herpes labialis.