Hidden viruses: How do they hide in our body even after healing?

Curious news intrigued and startled people recently: Doctor Ian Crozier, who contracted the Ebola virus, underwent treatment and was found to be cured after a series of tests, but found that the disease was still lodged in his body when he noticed a strange change. In the color of your eye.

What has been discovered from this is that people who have contracted Ebola may still have lodged it in certain parts of the body even though they thought they were already free of the problem. However, the fact that a virus is “hidden” in some obscure place of our organism is nothing new.

Some viruses are like ninjas.

A classic example is the varicella-zoster virus, which causes both chickenpox and herpes zoster. It stays in our body for a lifetime, hidden within nerve cells, and can eventually manifest itself. This is why you get chickenpox only once in your life: in other contacts with the microorganism, the person is not infected simply because he already has the virus. In adulthood it may happen that varicella-zoster manifests again, but only then in the form of herpes zoster.

These infectious agents can hide in certain structures of our body basically for two reasons: either because our immune systems do not act where they are or they remain dormant, which misleads our defenses, which think there is nothing harmful there .

This is exactly what happened to the doctor whose eye went from blue to green because of Ebola: the virus, though eradicated from the rest of his body, was trapped inside his eyeball where our immune system does not interfere. The eye has its own defense system, which has not detected the presence of the disease. Other parts of our body also have their own methods to protect themselves from various threats such as the brain and the testicles.

Trying to turn the tables

And what must be done to completely eradicate such viruses? In fact, it is not yet known for sure. In the case of diseases that are in places with a lower immune system action, stronger antibiotics are administered that can penetrate the isolated region. Specifically in Ian Crozier's situation, it was unclear whether his cure was due to the experimental drug that was used or whether his own body eliminated the invader in some way, as in some rare cases our immune system may indeed act within. of the eye. Yes, medicine is quite complicated and sometimes confusing.

When it comes to viruses that sleep inside cells, doctors try to trick them into activating them and our bodies can detect and fight them on their own or with the help of antivirals. In any case, it is yet another challenge that medicine faces: to take it a step further in this eternal battle between humans and viruses.