Eli5 What does Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) do to your body long term?
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Usually nothing. When you get infected with it and fight it off or just briefly get mononucleosis, it gets in some of your epithelial cells and B cells. Most of the time it just sits there doing nothing. Occasionally something can cause it to reactivate, and you might get a little sick, it’ll infect some new cells, and go back to latency.
However it can rarely cause serious problems years down the road. It’s one of the “oncoviruses”, meaning viruses that cause (or maybe more accurately involved in getting) some cancers, notably Burkitt’s lymphoma, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and possibly gastric carcinoma (it’s hard to tell sometimes because so many people have the virus). It’s also associated with chronic fatigue syndrome but there’s a debate in virology about whether it’s involved or not. The thing is that we think about 90% of people worldwide are infected with EBV. So for most people it’s probably never even noticeable, and we’re trying to figure out what it does differently in people that have the rare problems but in most cases we don’t know yet.
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