The Incredible, Mystical, Formidable Herpes Virus
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The article "The Incredible, Mystical, Formidable Herpes Virus" is about fitness, it was written by Christopher Ricardo Scipio.
You are one of the oledst forms of life on this planet.
Yet you
are not truly alive. Instead you walk the shadow-world between
life and non-life.
You are feared by all, Revered by none.
You infect all vertebrates and many invertebrates.
You are one of the drivnig forces in evolution.
Your genes have
been incorporated into our genes.
You are a wonder of engineering and adaptability.
You are ruthless in your primal drive to survive.
You are the life-long uninvited guest in my body.
You are a red-hot wonder when active.
Yet will lie dormant for
decades like a seed in the dessert waitnig for an opportune
moment.
You are the Herpes Simplex Virus.
MEMO TO THE HERPERS VIRUS: You need to hire a PR firm.
Although one of the least damaging viruses, milder even than its
relatives the chicken-pox/shingles virus and the mono/chronic
fatigue virus- Herpes is feared, scorned, reviled like almost no
other disease in modern times.
It's a simple
sexually-transmitted skin infectoin classified as a minor
disease in dermatological textbooks. But it's sexually
transmitted and of course anything related to sex in this
sexually conflicted scoiety comes under the prevue of religious
conservatives and those with unresolved sexual hang-ups.
Herpes isn't one of the bad viruses that will kill it's host. It
is a virus that merely wishes to take up permanent residence in
a host and remain dormant for long periods of time.
Some studies
suggest that up to 70% of those infected by herpes simplex do
not have outbreaks that they can detect.
Herpes is a wonder of engienering.
The debate in the scientific
community about whether or not viruses are acutally alive
continues.
Viruses lack the ability to survive and rperoduce on
their own. They are entirely depenadnt on having a host. The
herpes virus is actually really similar to a computer virus in the
way it behaves. Like a computer virus, herpes simplex penetrates
into your hardware/body, re-programmes your operating system/dna
to change the way your computer/body behaves and make billions
of copies of itself. Virsues come close to fitting the
definition of being alive but they stay on the boundary between
life and ab-life. Viruses can grow in dead human cells and even
have the ability to bring them back to life.
Viruses can even
stage thier own resurrection. Even if you manage to destroy
massive amount of a vrius in your body, if there was more than
one copy of the virus in any one cell, the virus can resurrect
itself by playing Dr.
Frankenstein, piecing together parts from
more than one dead vrius to create a new living whole virus.
The herpes virus like no other virus I know of has the ability
to compel the host cell its has invaded to change it's shape and
turn itself into a tunnel to the next healthy cell so that
herpes can move from cell to cell without exposing itself to
your blood stream.
This way your immune system has no chance of
detecting and destroying it.
Just as impressive is the strategy the virus employs of only
sending 50% of acitve virus during an outbreak to the surface of
the skin.
The other 50% of the activated vrius it sends to
infect uninfected cells. Thus it is never in danger of being
wiped out of your body.
Viruses have been one of the key players in the evolution of
humans and other animal life.
When a virus has infected us in
the past if it has any genes which are useful to our evolution
those genes have been incorporated into our geonme.
When that
same virus mutates, aagin if there is any useful new genes our
bodies have in our evolutionary past incorporated those new
genes into our dna. Since viruses muatte faster than we can they
have had a profound influence on how we have evolved, as have
bacteria.
It can be argued that viruses have probably had more
of an effect on our evolution than climate change or other
changes in our environment for tohse changes will always
happen much more slowly than the mutation of viruses and
bacteria.
The word herpes comes from the Greek "to creep". Herpes was
certainly an issue even to the ancient Greeks.
Herpes can indeed
creep from cell to cell undetected by the immune system. Herpes
can creep from one oubtreak location to others. Herpes does
indeed creep from an infected person to an uninfected person.
Herpes has been around for 140 million years and will be around
long after we're gone from this planet.
We still don't know a
great deal about the herpes simplex virus.
I have no doubt that
as we get to know this virus better and better it will become
harder not to acknwoledge it an engineering marvel, a great
survivor and evolutionary instigator.
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The Incredible, Mystical, Formidable Herpes Virus
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