Dealing with Shingles
Symptoms, Treatments, and Information on Shingles

Shingles is an outbreak of rash or blisters on the skin that is caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox.
Symptoms of Shingles
The initial signs of shingles are often marked by burning or tingling pain, or sometimes numbness or itch, in one particular location on only one side of the body. After several days, a rash of blisters filled with fluid similar to chickenpox might appear in one area on one side of the body. Shingles pain can be intense or mild.  Some people have mostly itching; some feel pain from the gentlest touch or breeze.
The most common location for shingles is a band spanning one side of the trunk around the waistline. Anyone who has had chickenpox is at risk for shingles and scientists believe that in the original battle with the varicella-zoster virus, some of the virus particles leave the skin blisters and move into the nervous system. When the varicella-zoster virus reactivates, the virus moves back down the long nerve fibers that go from the sensory cell bodies to the skin where it makes the skin erupt into a rash.
Transmitting Shingles
If someone with a shingles rash passes the virus to a child who has never had chickenpox, the child will develop chickenpox, not shingles.  However, a person with chickenpox cannot communicate shingles to someone else. 
Treatment for Shingles
With antiviral drugs the severity and duration of an attack of shingles can be significantly reduced by immediate treatment. Drugs for treatment include acyclovir, valcyclovir, or famcyclovir. Antiviral drugs may also help stave off the painful after-effects of shingles known as postherpetic neuralgia. Steroids, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, and topical agents are some other treatments for postherpetic neuralgia.
Recently, the Food and Drug Administration approved a VZV vaccine for use in people 60 and older who have had chickenpox. Many older adults will have for the first time a means of preventing shingles when this vaccine becomes more widely available. Researchers found that the vaccine reduced the expected number of later cases of shingles by half when given to older adults. Additionally, the severity and complications of shingles were dramatically reduced in people who still got the disease despite immunization. However, the shingles vaccine is only a preventive therapy and is not a treatment for those who already have shingles or postherpetic neuralgia.
For most healthy people, the pain subsides within a few weeks, the lesions heal, and the blisters do not scar.  However, shingles is a serious threat to those with HIV infection or who are receiving immune-system-weakening chemotherapy treatments.  People who receive organ transplants are also vulnerable to shingles since they are given drugs that suppress the immune system.