Like for example, the cold sore virus apparently stays with you for it’s whole life once you’re infected. But it has “active” phases where you actually have cold sores, and then it can go away and just lay dormant inside your body after, until it’s ready to do it again.
What’s the point of this dormant phase? How does the virus benefit from this? In my mind, it would make more sense if you always had cold sores once infected.
If we know the virus doesn’t leave and is just having a spa day when it doesn’t feel like doing it’s thing, how come we can’t get rid of it? If we know what the problem is, and where the problem is, why can’t we do anything about it?
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If you would have cold sores all the time, people wouldnt kiss you and the virus would not spread. So it evolved into a come and go state.
After initial infection, the Herpes Simplex Virus (causative agent of cold sores), travel and hides on our nerves.
Viruses are usually something that can be combatted by our immune system, but our immune system does not travel around nerves.
So basically it just waits for its time that the body starts to have weaker immune system again or be in a state where the virus could replicate again, causing the on and off cold sores.
They’re called cold sores because they take advantage of our bodies’ weakened immune system when we’re fighting something else, such as a cold. So it “hides” from our immune system until it has a better chance of producing a sore for longer, thus giving it a better chance of spreading and doing what viruses do.
Herpes have evolved to thrive in both skin cells and in nerve cells. However they behave very differently in the different types of cells. In skin cells it reproduces rapidly creating cold sores and spread the virus to other hosts. However the immune system is quite strong in the skin, this is where most infections come inn to the body. And with a very active virus the immune system gets very active to force the herpes virus in the skin away.
However nerves are usually quite a bit away from most immune system cells. They tend to lie further away from blood vessels then other cells making it harder for random antibodies to get to the nerves. And the herpes virus behaves very differently in the nerve cells and only reproduce enough to stay alive. With this lower activity and greater distance from the blood vessels it takes longer for the immune system to react to it, and even then it may only affect a few infected nerve cells and other infected cells may be other places in the body. This means the herpes virus will survive in the body for a long time before lower immune system activity towards it makes it so a few viruses can reach skin cells and start a new outbreak of cold sores.
The explanations here are abit “conscious”, as if the virus had a brain itself and knows what it is doing. No it can infect 2 types of cells, skin and nerve cells.
When it infects nerve cells, some of these are very secluded and protected. For example in our spine. This place is sterile. It is like the eye of the storm, where it can sit safely.
At the same time, nerve cells are rather quiscent. Untill a few years ago, it was thought that brain cells could not be regenerated. That the body didn’t make new braincells. Today scientists can manipulate, to make the brain cells divide, but the point of it all is that they don’t really do that.
So the Herpes infects a neuron, that is a slow factory in it’s inside, not doing alot of internal work. And it takes it over, and thus slowly begins making copies of itself, because the cell it infected is slow in production. So it only expells a low concentration of Herpes Virus. Together with it’s isolation, with little immune system around it, our body can’t get rid of it. It’s hard to get to, and the low amount of Virus coming out is not enough to sound the alarm.
So it forces us, to perpetually make antibodies against it, for the rest of our lives, as it constantly in a slow stream sends out viruses it produce, and our body snatches them up as they travel through the bloodstreams of our body.
Now what happens if we get attacked by another virus, is that the antibodies towards that virus rises very sharply. So lets say there is suddenly 100 cold antibodies, every time there is 1 herpes antibody. While we are still making antibodies against herpes, we only have a finite amount of immunecells, that are the rest of our immune system.
So all the megacariocytes for example, are reacting to cold virus antibodies, because the concentration of them is much higher. Suddenly the lonely Herpes Virus in our bloodstream, doesn’t get caught. It manages to infect a skin cell.
Now we constantly make new skin, and shed dead skin from our bodies. Our epidermis layers, are very active cells, they are high producing factories, very busy. And when the Herpes takes over that factory, it takes over a busy factory that makes alot of Herpes virus. And it causes an outbreak, the antibody response to herpes rise and our immunesystem recognizes it and combats the virus in a cold sore.
So the Herpes is an ambush predator. It lies still in a slow cell, but when we are attacked by another predator, it attacks us in the back.
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