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Not everything at Coachella is made for Instagram.
The immediate area surrounding the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California has been hit by what appears to be a severe herpes outbreak. HerpAlert, a digital herpes diagnostic center, confirmed that it has seen a tenfold increase in prescriptions to treat the sexually-transmitted disease and that requests were rolling in as early as early as the first day of the festival, Newsweek reported.
HerpAlert said that on a regular day, it will serve about 12 patients, but as early as two days into the start of the festival — which began April 12 — the service received nearly 250 requests in a day. By the end of the second weekend of Coachella, more than 1,105 cases have been reported.
The infected areas include Indio, Palm Desert and Coachella Valley.
Herpes is not an uncommon disease, as Newsweek noted, and is active in nearly 67 percent of the world population. According to a World Health Organization report in 2015, more than 3.7 billion people were positive for HSV-1, or the oral herpes virus.
“Coachella, like any summertime music festival, combines several factors that can increase the likelihood of both new herpes transmission and flare-ups of existing cases of both oral and genital herpes,” HerpAlert medical director Dr. Lynn Marie Morski told the magazine, “such as decreased sleep, increased sun exposure, and people getting intimate with one another.”
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