Shingles is a childhood virus hiding in your nerves
Long after a fever breaks, a dormant virus remains coiled inside your sensory nerves, waiting for your immune system to blink before it strikes again.
Decades after you recover from chickenpox, the varicella-zoster virus is still technically part of you. It retreats from your skin to the dorsal root ganglia—clusters of nerve cells near your spine—where it enters a state of deep hibernation. It stays there for life, effectively invisible to your immune system until age or stress causes your cellular defenses to dip below a critical threshold.
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