The Incredible, Mystical, Formidable Herpes Virus

You are one of the oldest 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 a red-hot wonder when active. Yet will lie dormant for decades
like a seed in the dessert waiting for an opportune moment.
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. reviled like almost no other disease
in modern times. It's a simple sexually-transmitted skin infection
classified as a minor disease in dermatological textbooks. But it's
sexually transmitted and of course anything related to sex in this
sexually conflicted society 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 engineering. The debate in the scientific
community about whether or not viruses are actually alive continues.
Viruses lack the ability to survive and reproduce on their own. They
are entirely dependant on having a host. The herpes virus is actually
very 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. Viruses 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 their
own resurrection. Even if you manage to destroy massive amount of a
virus 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 virus 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 active virus during an outbreak to the surface of the skin. The
other 50% of the activated virus 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 genome. When that same virus mutates. again if
there are any useful new genes our bodies have in our evolutionary past
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.
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 since those 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 outbreak 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 acknowledge it an engineering
marvel. a great survivor and evolutionary instigator.

That is definitely an optimistic way to look at it. After the shock wore
off of knowing that I had contracted it. and I started doing intense
research on it. I really can say that I was slightly impressed by the
complexity of it. It still does get me down from time to time. but when I
can step back and look at it. it really is an interesting creation.