Spreading hsv-1 to our mouths!

Hello,
My girlfriend and i both have genital HSV-1 and both had our first and only outbreak about 3 months ago, and we havent had oral since before the outbreak, i was jsut wondering what are the chances that we could actual spread it from our genitals to our mouths if we were to engage in oral, and if we should wait how long?
thanks so much,
John

[gracefromHHP]

We dont' have a lot of studies on this but there are a few that looked for the appearance of actual cold sores in folks who were diagnosed as having hsv1 genitally. One study about 1/4 of folks got cold sores too and the other study about 2/3's of folks got actual cold sores too. Since most folks who contract hsv1 orally don't get obvious cold sores to know it, we have no easy way of knowing if you also have the virus orally or not.  The thing is - it doesn't really matter for you two in this situation. Just don't perform oral on obvious genital lesions and you should be fine regardless.

How were you two diagnosed as having hsv1 genitally?

grace

[cougar55]

I'm not 100% sure, but in a lot of my research about oral herpes/transmission, it seems highly unlikely that you can have the same strain in two different locations.  So it would be very difficult for you to contract HSV 1 both orally and genitally.

[heavyhitter]

Well Grace,
We both got it within days of each other when i happen to be home from school, not sure who gave it to who, but we decided to start to have a real relationship because of it/we were both thinking about it for a while anyway, and we just help each other deal with it.

But we both would like to do oral again, but don't want to have all bumps on our lips, just hoping that we could do it without a big chance of getting it on the mouth, and she had a culture that showed type 1 instead of 2.

what do you guys think we should do?


Thanks for all your help btw

[gracefromHHP]

I wouldn't remotely worry about performing oral in this situation.  If one of you has active genital lesions, just don't perform oral on that partner until the lesions are all healed.  

grace