Tune: The Sounds of Silence, Simon and Garfunkle.

Hello Herpes our old friend.
You'll be with `us 'til the end .
'Cause the virus softly creeping,
Left its genes while we were sleeping
Not integrated into our genome,
It'll roam, that episome.
The DNA of Herpes

Herpes simplex 1 and 2
Will forever be with you
On our gums, lips, eyes, or down there too
And there isn't much that we can do
But there is Acyclovir to help
And we'll want help
From Herpes hurting you

"Fools," say I "you must beware!"
Herpes simplex's everywhere
Symptomatic or in the ganglia
Caught in New York or in East Anglia
It will be latent
And reoccur when times are bad
And you'll be had
When Herpes comes for you.

Written by:
Helen C. Davies, Ph.D.
Professor Microbiology
Univ. Pennsylvania School of Medicine
Arranged by Brian Glatt and Helen Davies, 1991, 1997

First heard (by me) along with several others on NPR some months ago when Scott Simon interviewed Prof. Helen C. Davies. She wrote these (using tunes familiar to almost everyone) as mnemonic devices for her microbiology students. I e-mailed NPR and asked if there were any way I could get the words to her songs. NPR forwarded my e-mail to Prof. Davies, and about a month ago, she graciously e-mailed me with the words, thanking my for my interest and apologizing for being so long in sending them to me, but that she had been swamped with similar requests. She may have copyrighted them, but of that, I'm not sure.

Don Firth