Scientific research is building knowledge on daily bases. What it was known suddenly changes with new evidence, with new technology or just new data and/or interpretation. It is the way we approach the world.
Viruses have been here for a very long time and we never don’t really know how to classify them. Are they alive? Can we define them as living molecules? Well, it will depend on the life definition. Certainly the can divide and spread all over the world. They can survive to very inhospitable conditions and they share «life chemistry» with what we usually call living organisms: Nucleic Acids. However, they can’t spread without the “help” of a host, a living cell, which provides the right machinery for that.
Some viruses were considered harmless or at least not so dangerous. Herpes simplex 1 (HSV-1) is one of them. Usually it causes cold sores and most of the people could deal with them without big troubles. However, there are a certain proportion of people that are more sensible to herpes infection and report having a very hard time when the virus reactivates. It is important to highlight that Herpeviridae family is a very special family, with 8 human viruses, many of them once infect us, can’t be removed from our organism. They hide in different locations and eventually becomes reactivated.
New lines of investigation have recently shown that they are not, actually, so harmless…
"Today they are considered a serius risk for Alzheimer disease. They have been linked with cognitive functioning"
Today, they considered are a serious risk for Alzheimer disease, and its role in the etiology of the illness have become more and more crucial. But on top of that, another set of recent scientific publications suggest they also have a role in cognitive processes. Basically, producing a decay in working memory (our RAM memory) and reduced cognitive performance.
All this evidence is quite new, so we need time to really understand how important this information could be and which impact could have in medicine. However, for those who are suffering recurrent infections I will recommend to be alert to all new data.
Many viruses from Herpes family have been linked to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Although still controversial there could be a relationship in many of those cases were viruses are reactivated recurrently.
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I’m also sharing some of the original publications here.
For ME/CFS:
http://med.stanford.edu/chronicfatiguesyndrome.html
