New research suggests that just one or two individual herpes virus particles attack a skin cell in the first stage of an outbreak, resulting in a bottleneck in which the infection may be vulnerable to medical treatment. Unlike most viruses that spread to new cells by bombarding them with millions of particles, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) — a virus that causes cold sores and genital lesions — requires just one or two viral particles to infect a skin cell in the first stage of cold sore formation, Princeton University researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
