You are one of the oldest life forms on this planet. However, you are not really alive. Instead, you walk through the shadow world between life and non-life.
You are feared by all, no one revered.
You infect all vertebrates and many invertebrates.
You are one of the driving forces of evolution. Your genes have been incorporated into our genes.
You are a marvel of engineering and adaptability.
You are ruthless in your primal drive to survive.
You are the uninvited guest of a lifetime in my body.
You’re a red-hot wonder when you’re active. Yet it will lie dormant for decades like a seed in the desert waiting for the right moment.
You are the herpes simplex virus.
MEMO FOR THE HERPERS VIRUS:
You need to hire a public relations firm.
Although it is one of the least harmful viruses, milder even than its relative, the varicella / shingles virus and the mono / chronic fatigue virus, herpes is feared, despised and vilified like almost no other disease in the times. modern. It is a simple sexually transmitted skin infection classified as a minor disease in dermatological textbooks. But it is transmitted sexually and, of course, anything related to sex in this sexually conflictual society falls under the influence of religious conservatives and those with unresolved sexual complexes.
Herpes is not one of the bad viruses that will kill its host. It is a virus that simply wants to take permanent residence in a host and remain inactive for long periods of time. Some studies suggest that up to 70% of those infected with herpes simplex have no outbreaks they can detect.
Herpes is an engineering marvel. The debate in the scientific community about whether viruses are really alive or not continues. Viruses lack the ability to survive and reproduce on their own. They are completely dependent on having a host. The herpes virus is actually very similar to a computer virus in the way that it behaves. Like a computer virus, herpes simplex penetrates your hardware / body, reprograms your operating system / dna to change the way your computer / body behaves, and makes billions of copies of itself. Viruses come close to the definition of being alive, but remain on the border 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 their own resurrection. Even if you manage to destroy a large number of viruses in your body, if there were more than one copy of the virus in any cell, the virus can be resurrected by playing Dr. Frankenstein, putting together parts of more than one dead virus. to create a whole new live virus.
The herpes virus, like no other virus that I know of, has the ability to force the host cell that it has invaded to change its shape and become a tunnel to the next healthy cell so that the herpes can move from one cell to another without be exposed to your bloodstream. In this way, your immune system has no chance of detecting and destroying it.
Just as impressive is the virus workers’ strategy of sending only 50% of the active virus during an outbreak to the surface of the skin. The other 50% of the activated virus is sent to infect uninfected cells. Therefore, you never risk being removed from your body.
Viruses have been one of the key players in the evolution of humans and other forms of animal life. When a virus has infected us in the past, if it has genes that are useful for our evolution, those genes have been incorporated into our genome. When that same virus mutates, again, if there are useful new genes that our bodies have had in our evolutionary past, they incorporated those new genes into our DNA. Since viruses mutate faster than we can, they have had a profound influence on how we have evolved, just like 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, since those changes will always happen much more slowly than the mutation of viruses and bacteria.
The word herpes comes from the Greek “crawl”. Herpes was certainly a problem even for the ancient Greeks. In fact, herpes can pass from one cell to another without being detected by the immune system. Herpes can spread from one place in the outbreak to another. In fact, herpes passes from an infected person to an uninfected one. Herpes has been around for 140 million years and will continue to exist long after we are gone from this planet. We still don’t know much about the herpes simplex virus. I have no doubt that as we get to know this virus better and better, it will be more difficult not to recognize it as an engineering marvel, a great survivor and evolutionary instigator.