I am dating a woman who is 50 years old and when she was a child she had the common cold sore "lip blisters" commonly known as HSV1/herpes of the mouth. I have come across many other women who have had this same situation, where they were a kid and they caught it probably from their parents or something. She rarely has outbreaks though, she says it comes up every now and then in her lifetime and the last time she had an outbreak was a few years ago. I have done the research on this and everyone is pretty clear that when there is an "obvious outbreak" you want to avoid contact for sure, that's understandable.

Now where it gets confusing to me is where I hear that even if there is no "obvious outbreak" she could spread via viral shedding. Does anyone have any statistics or research on how common it is for this to realistically happen? I am not certain if this is just something the medical community is saying because they don't want to be liable if they don't warn? For example, an analogy I would use is getting struck by lighting is possible if your outside in a thunderstorm but the likelihood of that happening is rare. I am wondering if its the same thing with this thing about shedding, where its actually rare? If anyone on here has every caught it from someone shedding or know someone who caught it from shedding or have statistics please chime in.

I would like to know because the fear of catching this has been mentally draining and I hope I am not having OCD about it. I want to protect myself but I don't want to be paranoid either. Like the analogy of the the thunderstorm I described, the likelihood of getting struck by lightening is rare. I am not sure if that same analogy applies to viral shedding or not.

The only thing I found from research is a University of Washington study that found that Viral shedding ebbs over time with HSV-1 genital infections, but that is "genital infections".