Worried about mouth sores: Canker and Cold Sores
Mouth sores can be quite annoying–brushing your teeth, eating a meal, and even speaking can become irritating tasks when those dreaded mouth sores pop up unannounced. And so now, I’ve got one big one inside my lip. Should I worry about passing it on to my son, or is there serious risks or some cure that I should know about?
I had vaguely remembered doctor advice since my first mouth sores as a kid and reading up on the subject at one time or another, but decided to refresh my knowledge base and blog about it here.
To clarify, there are two main types of mouth sores concerning most people, both often confused and commonly mis matched/identified. One is naturally occurring in everybody, while the other is a contagious viral infection, infecting at least more than half of the world’s population. We call them canker sores and cold sores respectively. A canker sore is the round white one inside your mouth that is not directly caused by a virus, while the latter, cold sores, also known as herpes simplex 1, is an infection that usually occurs around and outside the mouth.
Cold sores, or mouth herpes is passed from one individual to the next usually via direct bodily contact of infected areas, i.e. kissing and oral sex. And so yes, one can attract genital herpes from an infected individual with mouth herpes via oral sex, which may prove to be a much regrettable situation, considering there is no publicly known cure for herpes. The life time disease will likely be dormant for most of your life pending that your immune system develops the antibodies, however, outbreaks should be expected throughout life.
Anyhow, my particular sores are / have been canker sores. I might have had a cold sore as kid, as I do recall getting blisters around my mouth, but perhaps were due to the dry and cold weather of Colorado. Can’t say I’ve had any such mouth outbreaks of herpes in a decade plus plus, so I’m not particularly worried.
Canker sores tend to show up several times a year, and the more I read and understand about them, the less I worry, albeit they are still annoying. There is not much scientific facts or solid knowledge about the cause of canker sores, but most people tend to agree that they are the product or reaction of the immune system–a symptom to some other sickness or bacterium, or deficiency of some particular bodily essential (iron or vitamin), accumulated stress, etc.
The important thing is canker sores are nothing serious to worry about, particularly regarding passing on to or recieving from others, i.e. via kissing, as said already, everyone is prone to them for internal reasons. In central Thai, canker sore is known as prae rawn nai แผลร้อนใน which translates to sore ( caused from) inner heat. In this sense, heat has implications of sickness or blood-immune malfunction. Not on a serious level, but Thais, particularly Thai Chinese believe that many diseases and sickness are rooted into ‘overheated’ blood and inner (immune system), which though poetic in one sense is consistent and logical in another sense
So despite what you may have thought, you weren’t infected with a canker sore because of someone else’s saliva–which brings back a memory when I was 12 when I gained my first French kissing experiences. (Not that I was some emerging horn dog then, but ‘prude’ kids weren’t considered cool..besides I didn’t lose the v card til I was 18)
So I had my 2nd or 3rd puppy love girlfriend, and to prove myself like every other 7th grader had to perform a witnessed French Kiss for at least 5 seconds. A day later, I happened to get a canker sore, and my ignorance then made me think it was directly from the kiss. I dumped the girl, and sited the canker sore as my reason. She must have been so humiliated.
That said, while canker sores may be harmless, one should still apply precautions with kissing and oral sex for the risk of herpes. There’s a good chance you may already have been infected and created antibodies to make your herpes dormant, but it’s no reason to not be conscious and careful, for viruses are known to mutate and combine with different strands…
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