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During an attack of chicken-pox, the patient develops life-long immunity, but the virus gets lodged in the nerves of the patient. The virus remains donnant at these sites but when the immunity is low or if the patient is treated with immunosuppressive drugs, the virus trapped in the nerve gets activated and produces a disease called 'herpes zoster'. The virus in these cases travels along the nerve and produces groups of vesicles in the skin area supplied by the nerve. These groups of vesicles are therefore, strictly limited to one side of the body in a band-like distribution (segmental distribution). This eruption. is generally associated with severe pain, which may in some cases even precede the cutaneous eruption and be misdiagnosed as nerve pain or spine pain. The vesicles are as a rule very tense and closely set over each other with a rim of redness around the vesicles. The vesicles however, as a rule dry up spontaneously within a week or 10 days and the pain also subsides in most of the cases, especially if the patient is less than 40 years in age.
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