The why is probably the fact that its a topical corticosteroid. Those
reduce local immune responses and so the virus can tend to take off more
easily. The common line you hear is that steroid alone on a herpetic
lesion is a big nono.

There is a combined steroid/antiviral in the works (look for ME609 for
those interested) which is designed to treat not only the virus itself
but also the inflammatory side of the lesion and combination was required,
and steroids plus antiviral are used in severe cases of eye infection
where the anti-inflammatory side of steroids is desperately needed. These
cases however absolutely rely on the fact there is an antiviral present at
all treatment times.

Alone steroids, if I remember correctly increase the shedding time of
virus in a lesion, increase lesion size and so on. If you go to pubmed
(www.pubmed.com) and plug in steroid and HSV you should get along list of
decent papers described the effects. Do look to the ones looking at
topical steroids (you are not plugging a systemic steroid in there)

Off hand if you also plug in work by A. Awan into pubmed you'll find a
fair amount of the base data for the combinations that will describe the
relative effects of the steroid alone since the research done would have
included steroid alone control groups.

Tim
--
When playing rugby, its not the winning that counts, but the taking apart
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