For example there are viral infections (actual viruses) that infect us humans and usually if left alone either go away with enough time, or we can take anti virals to help our immune system along.
Hell even in warts which are caused by the HPV virus, if left untreated can go away in as little as 2-5 years without any sort of treatment, so what makes herpes or any virus that never does away, different from the other viruses that can go away?
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The exact mechanism by which some viruses stay permanent are not precisely understood. They alter and modify host cells (us) to basically take residence and stay permanently. Then every so often, they flair up and attack again. Shingles, for instance, is caused by the chickenpox virus. Someone will have chickenpox, get over it, but some of the virus will still live and remain dormant for decades in nerve cells. Then, it reactivates and harms again.
Our body stops actively recognizing the virus as a threat while it is dormant. It’s important to remember that viruses aren’t attacking us to kill us. They want to live and keep spreading, and if the host dies, they die. If the host’s immune system eradicates them, they die. It’s in their best interest to try to stay here permanently, without attacking us, and without being attacked by our immune system. so some have evolved to be able to do that.
Each virus that hides in you for an extended period of time has its own way of doing that. Even within the Herpesviruses, of which there are 9 that infect humans, have different ways of doing this. HSV-1, which is probably the one you’re thinking of, can infect cells around the skin. It makes a bunch of copies of itself and then some of those can ride into the neurons in that area. It can then hide out there for a very long time, reemerging at certain times.
We know lots of details of how this works, but not all of them yet.
I think that is about right for a five year old.
Inside most cells we have DNA; which is like an instruction manual to make all of the different proteins that our body needs.Some viruses have DNA as well (or can convert their genetic material into DNA), in other words their “instruction manual is written in the same way as ours. These viruses can “fuse” their instruction manual with ours, that means that when our cells try to make proteins, it might read the pages or sentences of the viral DNA and we end up making their proteins until finally we make a whole virus (this happens in hundreds of thousands of cells simultaneously sometimes), when that happens these viruses could flare up.
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