DEAR DR. DONOHUE: I've been getting boils on my body. I got them when I was little, then didn't have them for years. Then the last two years, they came back on me. They are real sore. I remember as a little girl, the doctor told my mother to make me drink pure black Cherry juice, like a syrup, but I could never stomach it. I usually get up to four boils at a time. I leep in a heated water bed. Can that cause it?
ANSWER: The person prone to boils must go on a very meticulous hygiene crusade, not just the oridnary everyday hygiene, but the kind that makes the skin a most inhospitable place for the staph germs. You may need every tool available to win the boils battle.Ask your pharmacist to give you a good germ-killing soap, such as the kind with chlorhexidine in it. Use that daily, and have everyone in the household use it, too. Bed linen and underclothing deserve special attention. Wash these in extra hot water. Don't share them or towels with other householders.
At the same time you are doing all this, get some bacitracin ointment and aply that to the boil sites. Your pharmacist can find that for you. Use a cotton applicator and apply a little to the front inside of your nostirls. This is sometimes the key to success, since boil-causing organisms may lurk there in hiding from attack, only to be transferred later by hand to other body areas.
Finally, if all this fails (try it all for a week or two) you need to enlist the expertise of a physician. For starters, he might prescribe antibiotics for which you need a presciption. That's the heaviest anti-boil artillery of all, and it almost always settles the matter for good.
If the heated water bed is making you hot and sticky at night, that can contribute to the problem. Boil germs love that environment. I never heard of the black cherry juice remedy, but it sounds awful.
DEAR DR. DONOHUE: Please answer this letter ASAP for my son's peace of mind. He is getting hysterical. A rash developed on his penis and he saw a doctor, who said it was molluscum contagiosum. What causes it? The doctor froze the individual spots, but now they are on his leg. He is 24 and has not had recent sexual contact. Are antibiotics needed? My son is so upset. He gets angry and feels that more should be done. The spots are brown with small white areas. -- P.B.
ANSWER: Molluscum contagiosum is a rather common viral skin infection. It can spread from personal contact or from inanimate objects (towels, for example).
The individual growths can be removed, but because they tend to be so numerous and since they do eventually disappear on their own in two months to a year, they are often treated with benign neglect, that is, left alone. There is no antibiotic for this.
To be more graphic, the blebs of this problem look like tiny pearls, a whitish area in the center of a darker one. You can squeeze this whitish material out, although you don't want to do that.
FOR S.H. -- Fifteen percent of all couples are infertile, a thid because of the woman, a third because of the man, and another third because of combined problems. You say your husband's sperm count is zero, and that, of course, makes it clearly his fault. It can stem from a number of disorders, including hormone deficiency, blockage of sperm ducts from the testes or absence of sperm-producing cells there. Many of these problems are treatable with drugs or surgery. I cannot say how successful any might be without knowing more of the specifics.
DEAR DR. DONOHUE: I have your herpes booklet, but still have some questions. Can you get it from a toilet seat? Is the drug Zovirax useful only in an initial outbreak? Is it possible to isolate the infected cells and sever the nerve there that contains the virus? That's probably a far=fetched idea, but please comment. -- L.F.
ANSWER: Herpes viruses can live on inanimate objects, but for only the briefest time. No case of herpes has, as far as I know, been linked to toilet-seat transmission. One or two cases have been associated with contaminated towels, but considering the enormous volume of herpes cases such oddities are not at all surprising.
Oral Zovirax (acyclovir) is most helpful for initial herpes symptoms. However, when the patient has six or more recurrences in a year it is often given daily for prevention. That does owrk, but when you stop the medicine you can have another outbreak.
Your question about nerve surgery is interesting. I cannot answer definitively. The virus doe slive deep within a nerve, the way many others do, like the shingle virus. Severing nerves where the shingles virus lives does not prevent fduture outbreaks there. I can't explain why, but researchinto that dampens any enthusiasm for a simlar appraoch in herpes. Apparently, the viruses find ways to seek hiding places no matter what you do. To order "Herpes: Don't Panic," write Dr. Donohue/No. 17, P.O. Box 19660, Irvine, CA 92713-0660, enclosing a long, stamped, self-addressed envelop and $1.25.