Long-term, low-dose antiviral treatment reduces the risk for potentially vision-damaging bouts of inflammation and infection, as well as pain, which occur when shingles affects the eye, according to research. Shingles occurs when the varicella-zoster virus, which causes chickenpox in children, lies dormant for decades in nerve cells and then starts multiplying again for reasons unknown. In about 8% of new shingles cases each year, the virus awakens in the nerve that supplies the forehead and eye, a condition called herpes zoster ophthalmicus, or HZO. Shingles causes keratitis when it affects the cornea, and iritis when inside the eye, with both...