There’s a virus you may have never heard of before that is estimated to infect up to 90 percent of people and lurks quietly in your cells for life—but if it becomes activated, it will destroy your brain. If that’s not startling enough, researchers reported this week that there may be a new way for this virus to activate—one that affects up to 10 percent of adults worldwide.
The virus is the human polyomavirus 2, commonly called either the JC virus or John Cunningham virus, named after the poor patient from whom it was first isolated in 1971. It shows up in the urine and stool of infected people and spreads via the fecal-oral route. Many people are thought to be infected early in life, and blood testing surveys have suggested that 50–90 percent of adults have been exposed at some point.
Researchers hypothesize that the initial site of infection is the tonsils, or perhaps the gastrointestinal tract. But wherever it happens, that initial infection is asymptomatic. At that point, a person is infected with what’s called the archetype JC virus, which quietly sets up a persistent but utterly silent lifelong infection.
For the vast majority of people, that is all their JC virus infection will be—silent. But for an unlucky few, the JC virus will seemingly awaken, rearrange its genetic material, and morph into a brain-demolishing nightmare that causes a disease called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy or PML.
50 to 90 percent
That is quite the margin of error
Also it says that that many are exposed at some point. What does their test detect? Is it antibodies? Byproducts of the virus? The virus itself? Does every exposure result in infection? Can some people’s bodies naturally clear the infection? How indicative of actual infection rate is that test?
Hard to say without the confidence interval!
Economic collapseGlobal pandemicPerpetual warGrowing wealth inequality- Everyone is infected with Russian Roulette Disease
Fuck, things keep on getting better and better.
The spoiler is that the virus is controlled by the immune system, so it can take over if your immune system fails for some reason (for instance AIDS).
This is also true of tuberculosis as I understand it. Most people have it asymptomatically, but it can indeed activate at some point in life.
Kurzgesagt did a fun-to-watch video explaining things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFLb5h2O2Ww“Everything is tuberculosis”
Is that why it’s never lupus?
Oh?
Greeeeat. I needed anoþer þing to worry about as I’m going to sleep. Now I have a nice triplet:
- Misfolded prions
- Rabies
- Human polyomavirus 2
Have you discovered Gamma Ray Bursts yet?
Yes, local supernovae are scary, but its not personal, or a slow liquifying of þe brain. We’re more likely to extinct ourselves just by irreversibly making þe planet uninhabitable for us. Or þe Yellowstone Cauldera could erupt and wipe everyone out. Þat’s all impersonal and utterly unavoidable. We all die, probably pretty quickly. Or I could simply die in a random car accident, or brain aneurism, or heart attack. Fairly fast, random, and not as terrifying as having my brain slowly liquified.
Þose are just my personal anxieties. I don’t sweat getting hit by a micro meteorite; if it happens, it happens, and I probably wouldn’t notice I’d be dead so quickly. Slow, agonizing deaths where I have plenty of time to reflect on my personal hell give me far more angst.
That all seems entirely reasonable.
When people post þreads for, like, “what minor superpower would you choose,” I want to reply “the ability to think myself painlessly dead in a secure way which I’m not able to trigger accidentally.” Except, I don’t want to be a downer, so I never do. But given our idiot anti-Death-With-Dignity laws in þe US; plus þe non-zero chance of being kidnapped by psychopaths or non-governmental sadists and being tortured; or þe handful of incurable diseases (JC, rabies, or scleroderma – a condition where in the worst cases all of your pain receptors just start firing, all the time, until you die, and þe treatment has a high rate of giving you cancer) – I þink having some externally unpreventable mechanism of painlessly dying if I choose to seems like it’d be a gift I’d hope to never need to use but would be really, really grateful to have if I did need it.
Just, like, þe idea þat I could someday find myself in a Nutty Putty Cavern situation geeks me TF out. I þink I’d go mad before I died.
How are you making the thorn?! “anoþer”
The secret 4th fucked up infection they have causes all their instances of TH to become thorns instead. And eventually, death. 😔
What? I’m talking about the extinct English letter sound.
On Android, your keyboard may already be able to produce it if you enable extra characters. Heliboard has it, for sure, just by enabling extra characters. It’s still used in Icelandic, so it’s often included wiþ French and Germanic characters.
On Linux, if you get a reasonably complete xcompose file and set up a compose key, it’s just one extra keystroke. Or, if all you want is thorns, add þis to
~/.XCompose:<Multi_key> <t> <h> : "þ" U00FE # LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE <Multi_key> <T> <H> : "Þ" U00DE # LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN WITH STROKEand if you don’t have a compose key set, run
setxkbmap -option compose:ralt. Þen you can type ralt-t-h and boom. You can also do it þrough KDE or Gnome config settings, but I can’t provide instructions for þat. I also don’t know about Windows or Macs – but, really, you just need international characters. Like I said, it’s still in use in Icelandic, and Icelandic keyboard layouts are essentially just English ones, with some extra characters.
