I am 41 years old, and I was diagnosed with recurrent shingles, on my perineum (the chicken pox virus settled in the spinal nerves S2, S3 and S4, which enervates this area of the body) a few years ago. I’ve had it three times in 2022 alone. All the tests show my immune system is “fine”, but we also know that the immune system is INCREDIBLY complicated. I had chicken pox as a child, and it remains in my body.
The burning pain spreads down my right buttock and the back of the thigh.
Unfortunately, in the UK, the shingles vaccine is not licensed to be given to patients under 50. If it was, I would get it in a HEARTBEAT.
Until the mess of Brexit, I have seriously considered traveling to a country where it is licensed to give to younger people (France, US, Canada). I am a dual Canadian-UK citizen, so traveling to Canada would be one option. However, geographically speaking, France would probably be the easiest – if it were not for the COVID pandemic and Brexit.
My GP does the best he can by giving me daily acyclovir, for maintenance, and I have carte blanche to raise the dosage for about 2 weeks at a time when it flares up: I call this a “blast dose”. It helps.
But I’m incredibly frustrated about the lack of licensing for younger patients. The rationale for it seems to be that the vaccine works less well for those under 50, so there wasn’t a market to license it for younger folks.
As a geneticist friend of mine put it, it makes no sense to deny treatment to an age group just because it “may” be less effective”. What if it were more effective than they thought? They’d never know without trying – assuming any side effects of the vaccine were nothing to worry over.
