The video may be fun and the bong may be the talk of the music nation, but poor Miley Cyrus ended up with a giant fever blister on her lip about eight days after she sucked on that bong.
If you have a good memory you would remember that Katie Holmes emerged from Scientology World captivity just before she married Tom Cruise with a gross amount of cold sores which were probably triggered by stress and sleep deprivation. Paris Hilton has had her share of gross cold sores too.
“Fever Blisters or cold sores, are caused by the herpes simplex 1 virus,” said Los Angeles physician Dr. Franchot Tone.
“One you’re infected with the cold sore virus, your are infected for life. Luckily this was not a herpes simplex 2 or genital herpes lesion and the good news, if there is good news, is that about 80% of Americans are infected with this virus by the time they reach age 20. Of the 80% infected, about 50% of them will go on to develop about one cold sore outbreak per year.
“There are treatments but it’s always best to just ride out the cold sore and avoid tampering with it. The virus lives a pretty much dormant life until something stimulates it — a cold, a flu, stress, menstruation, exposure to too much sun, lack of sleep and a host of other things. Once it comes back to life, it travels along a nerve to the lip or the nose or chin and then you get that ugly and painful and crusty sore. The more you mess with it the more you risk spreading the virus to another nerve on your lip and even to another spot on your body. I’m a doctor and even to me it’s pretty freaking disgusting.”
Dr. Tone said that the timing of the cold sore was right in step with the time line of exposure to the bong to the outbreak, although it is possible that she has had cold sores before and that the bong did not contaminate her. According to a technician on the set, however, there was an actor involved in the making of the video who had a nasty cold sore that had to be heavily covered with makeup during the shoot, and that in the video, that actor tokes on the bong before Miley Cyrus.
“If she was already infected by the virus prior to the the making of the video, and the odds of that are about 50-50, then the stress of the shoot caused an outbreak,” continued Dr. Tone. “If someone with an active sore toked before her, then she was exposed to millions of the viruses and that’s going to stick with her forever 0r unless a cure is found.
“If she caught it from the bong, she is lucky she did not get a case of primary herpetic stomatitis which is a nasty herpes infection of the mouth that is sometimes the hallmark of a first time infection and is often found in babies.”
Medically, a cold sore is known as Herpes Labialis — the Latin translation of which is “Snakes on the lip.” There are prescription drugs that hold back the virus in people who are prone to getting a lot of nasty cold sores; Famvir and Acyclovir are a few, but they require a prescription from a doctor and they can have side effects and can be very expensive. Also, they must be taken before you even get the sore otherwise the cold sore runs its course just as though you didn’t take any medicine at all. 
Miley may have opted for the over-the-counter medication, Abreva which is a good medicine that seems to shorten the life of the sore by one day — not much consolation when you consider that a cold sore goes from there to gone in about 14 days, but in country music cross-over kids they seem to last longer and look uglier. Kids today are calling cold sores “Walmart Warts” because they tend to be worse on poor and trashy people, and once a kid is branded as a WalMart Wart, their social life is pretty much over.
“Kids, like, don’t know that, like there is a reason why in the old days people like totally didn’t like drink from each other’s glasses or whatever,” said 15 year-old cold sore sufferer Nainina Frammerhampt of Plant City, Florida. “I get like two cold sores a week and now I like have to be home-schooled, but that’s okay cause almost all the kids in central Florida don’t even go to school at all. When one sore starts to heal, another starts to pop out, so I’m constantly in a state of cold sore flux. ”
Hmmm? She said “flux” so she must be very well home-schooled.
“I do my best with my poor infected daughter,” said Nainina’s mom, Elderberry Frammerhampt. “At first my husband wanted to send her to an institution and just get rid of her, but then he got drunk one night and was electrocuted when he spilled his beer on a pinball machine at the bar, so I was able to keep my little darlin.
“She’s a good student and we have 4 hours of lessons a day but I will not look at her because her lip makes me sick. She likes to smoke but we have our packs marked so her herpes fingers don’t get on my pack. Sharing a cigarette with a WalMart Wart sufferer is like playing with dynamite.”
Nainina, despite her intelligence and bravery, sounds likes she misses school.
“My mouth has so many like crusty sores on my lip that they totally put a barricade around my school that’s like the one they have around the White House. I think Miley has a lot of fever blisters like me because she is always working and not getting enough sleep. She also looks like the kind of person who gets them. We have a certain look.”
Poor Miley — she is now an official WalMart Wart and whenever that lip starts to tingle or itch, she knows that a new cold sore is coming. Hopefully she will only get one or two a year like other people, but if she ends up like poor Nainina, she is going to have a hard time living the Hollywood life.
