Originally Posted by
rickair7777
I think we're splitting hairs.
Summary: Unlike a bacteria, a virus cannot achieve a happy, steady-state, symbiotic existence with your body. It's always either hiding, or fighting your body and immune system. In order to reproduce, it MUST destroy the cells which make up your tissue.
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Incorrect.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6476163/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4440412/
An excerpt:
The most enigmatic picornavirus has been, and remains, hepatitis A virus. Unlike its more rapidly growing cousins poliovirus, rhinovirus and coxsackievirus, naturally occurring isolates of hepatitis A virus have not been observed to lyse infected cells in tissue culture or in infected humans [reviewed in (6)]. The liver of a person infected with hepatitis A virus can often be heavily infected, so the virus must spread from cell to cell. During acute human infection, virus appears in the stool before any evidence of any immune-mediated hepatocyte damage occurs. Therefore, hepatitis A virus would seem to spread exclusively non-lytically. Furthermore, such examples are not limited to picornaviruses; for example, simian virus 40 (SV40), a DNA virus, was shown to release from monkey kidney cells at very high titers in the apparent absence of lysis measured on a population scale (7).
That means viruses are less likely to find a steady-state point where they can just hang out forever, although it does happen in some cases.
Except there are subsets of cells in your body that are ALWAYS transient. Low level infections in cells that are constantly being sloughed anyway do no real harm to the entire organism, like warts caused by human papilloma virus.
Others modulate themselves to produce new virus without killing the cell. Yet others appear to be repressed by body immune mechanisms and flare briefly when those immune mechanisms are suppressed or whither over time. For a more complete description:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK8538/
But yeah, we are splitting hairs. It doesn’t matter if you call it latent infection, persisting low grade infection, viral dormancy, or whatever. And while the chronic infecting organism isn’t symbiotic, it isn’t all that harmful either necessarily, although it can serve as a potential source of spread to others, like shingles in an older person giving a younger susceptible one chickenpox.