Thank you for this!

First, this statement: “one in eight people have the virus that can cause genital herpes”. In the U.S., 15.7% of people between 14 and 49 have HSV-2, while 53.9% have HSV-1 (http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/10/14/infdis.jit458.full). Either virus can cause genital herpes. If you dig into the data you’ll see that the percentage of infections go up with age: if your clients are men and women between 40-49, 25.6% will have HSV-2 and 63.6% will have HSV-1. Unfortunately these stats aren’t broken down by gender. There are a lot of fake numbers on the web about herpes prevalence: e.g., the numbers on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_herpes_simplex are not correct. There are also numbers floating around that say 80% of people have it, or it’s really almost 100% if you had a fine grained test: these are also not correct.

Why does it matter? Because the chances are good that your clients already have herpes (though it matters which they have, and which you have: HSV-2 grants some immunity to HSV-1, but not the other way around). Once you have a given variant and it’s established, you can’t get reinfected in another site: basically, you can’t catch it twice. So that’s a potential angst reducer.

Second, this: “testing for the virus is difficult when not suffering from an episode”. There are older blood tests that can produce unreliable results, but all modern tests give very high sensitivity (“do you have herpes?”) and specificity (“do you have HSV-1 or HSV-2?”). A good reference is at http://www.ashasexualhealth.org/pdfs/HerpesBloodTestGuide.pdf. Note these tests only work after the infection is established: it will take several months before enough antibodies are present, but six months is more than enough time.

The reason most health care professionals don’t screen for herpes isn’t because it’s hard to detect: it’s because many people have it, many people don’t know they have it, there’s nothing really to do if you do have it, and when patient find out they have it they freak out and treat it like a sexual death sentence (http://www.cdc.gov/std/herpes/screening.htm). But as another poster pointed out, herpes isn’t a big deal: it’s common and it’s not going to kill you.

But it’s worth getting a test to figure out whether you have genital HSV-1 or HSV-2. It’s unfair but if you had to pick a HSV to work with, HSV-1 is the one to hope for. I don’t know of any studies of genital-to-genital or genital-to-oral transmission rates for HSV-1 (there are plenty for HSV-2). But you’ll have less asymptomatic viral shedding with HSV-1 than HSV-2 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4084907/), and no shedding means no chance of infection. There also aren’t any studies on the effects of antivirals on HSV-1 shedding, but most people assume it helps.

For more info, there are two fantastic books on herpes that are worth seeking out: Terri Warren’s “The Good News About the Bad News” and Charles Ebel and Anna Wald’s “Managing Herpes: Living and Loving with HSV”. I’d highly recommend either.

Best of luck.

Yeah a family member of mine does too (and had three children without issue or passing it on).

The idea of losing a job as a stripper for something shared by the majority of customers and probably coworkers is bizarre…

And yeah, civilians don’t even disclose to their partners, nor think they have to bother to get tested or use protection, which is on them.

You know that sex workers are actually one of the most safer sex adherent (and thus STI free) populations, according to many, many studies? Plus all the anecdotal evidence I’ve ever encountered. I personally haven’t even given a blowjob without a condom for almost fifteen years. And it’s the civilians I hear about not even disclosing to their *partners*.