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A study of more than 200,000 people by researchers found at least a 17% reduction in dementia diagnoses in the six years after the new recombinant shingles vaccination, equating to 164 or more additional days lived without dementia. The benefit was seen in both sexes but was greater in women, and the findings suggest that the recombinant shingles vaccine may have additional value in terms of protection against dementia. Shingles is a painful and serious condition afflicting many elderly people. It is caused by the Herpes zoster virus that can flare up in people who previously had chicken pox. After...

Herpes infections may be a side effect of a COVID-19 vaccine, experts have revealed. Scientists in Israel identified six cases in a new study of patients developing a skin rash known as herpes zoster — or shingles — after receiving the Pfizer vaccine, according to a study in the Rheumatology journal. Herpes zoster starts off as a small, itchy skin rash, but if left untreated, it could cause nerve damage and pain, the Jerusalem Post reported. This can include a prolonged burning sensation on the skin even after the rash disappears.

An experimental vaccine can reduce both the incidence and the severity of shingles by more than half, doctors reported yesterday, in a development that could spare hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans from an extremely painful disease. The effectiveness of the vaccine was determined in an unusually large clinical trial involving more than 38,500 people over the age of 60, the group most prone to shingles, a skin and nerve infection. "I think the results are quite clinically significant," said Dr. Michael N. Oxman, the leader of the study, which is being published today in The New England Journal of...

Medical texts describe chickenpox, or varicella, as a highly contagious but rather mild childhood disease that only rarely results in serious complications, a fact that has set off decades of controversy over whether the vaccine to prevent chickenpox is warranted. Had anyone asked me, I would have said absolutely. Although I had none of the characteristics associated with more severe cases, at age 8 I had what my pediatrician called the "worst case of chickenpox" he had ever seen — more than 1,000 intensely itchy blisters all over my body. Sick for three weeks, I spent hours each day in...