You probably have herpes and you’re not alone. 

When you get diagnosed with herpes you feel like you’re all alone and the only person in the world with herpes. Well guess what!!! You’re now the majority. Yes, the majority of people have herpes. In fact 84% of the world population has herpes. 

Let’s break that down for you...

First let’s talk about the United States and people with herpes. I pulled up numbers from the census and data from the Center of Disease Control to get as exact as we can. Unfortunately the CDC only had numbers of people from the ages of 14-49 with herpes. Now we know that there are plenty more people with herpes that are over 49 but we have to go with the numbers and data that’s provided. 

In the US there are 112,806,642 people in the US between 18-44. Of people aged 14-49 in the U.S., 47.8% have HSV-1 and 11.9% have HSV-2. Or if you want to total the percentage of people with herpes both type 1 & 2 it’s 59.7%.  That’s a lot of people and remember we’re not even including people 50 or above. 

Here it is broken down into numbers instead of looking at it as a percent. There are  53,921,574.90 people with HSV 1 and 13,423,990.40 people with HSV 2. This totals to be 67,345,565.30 people with HSV in the US between the ages of 18-44.  Again that’s a ton of people! 

I’ve also included graphs and more data breaking it down to type 1 & 2 as well as the age, race, and sex. I found this pretty fascinating and I think you will.

Ok so now let’s talk about the world population with herpes. The information that I can find on numbers are that  ⅙ or 17% of the population has HSV 2 and ⅔ or 67% of the population has HSV 1. This means that 84% of the population has HSV either HSV 1 or HSV 2.  Unfortunately there are no cool graphs and data on this that break it down so I had to look at this with some rough numbers.  There are 7.53 billion people in the world. So that means that 17% or 128,010,000 have HSV 2 and 67% or 504,510,000 have HSV 1. This totals to 632,520,000 in the world with either HSV 1 or 2. These numbers are astonishing.

You are so not alone. The only reason why you feel alone is because nobody is talking about it. We’ve been made to feel like we are carrying an awful secret or we’re bad people for living life. As you can see from these numbers that the majority of the population has herpes. Feel free to use this information while disclosing or sharing it with others. Educating people on herpes is the best way to stop the stigma.  

Don’t let having herpes stop you from living your life and following your dreams. Go out and crush it!!!

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Xoxo,

Alexandra

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