If you catch chlamydia or gonorrhea, you can have it treated with antibiotics and it will go away. However, there is no cure for herpes. So once someone has it, she has it for life. Over an entire population, the cases just add up over time. This means that middle-aged adults have some shockingly high herpes rates. For example, 50 to 70 percent of single women aged 45 to 50 have herpes. (By the way, the chart above is for herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2), aka genital herpes. The other type is “oral herpes,” HSV-1, although both viruses can infect people in both, um, places.)