Talk:Slow virus

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Missing[edit]

HIV is the exemplar slow virus. --Una Smith (talk) 04:26, 29 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have added the reference to HIV -KrispyKrme (talk) 06:28, 5 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"slow bacteria"[edit]

Like slow viruses, also some bacterial infections commonly take a long, slowly progressive course that usually results in death if left untreated. Examples include tuberculosis, syphilis, Lyme disease and Whipple's disease. Like slow viruses, "slow bacteria" seem to camouflage very efficiently from the host immune system, so it cannot prevent the infection from spreading over a course of months and years. The only significant difference to slow virus diseases is that bacterial infections can be treated effectively with antibiotics (unless the pathogens are multi-resistant), giving a possibility to cure "slow bacterial diseases". By contrast, slow virus and prion diseases are for the most part still incurable (rabies is treatable with immunization, but considered incurable once the first symptoms occur), at best the disease progress can be slowed down to allow for a longer lifespan. But this difference just reflects our current knowledge, it may change someday in the future... --79.243.244.243 (talk) 02:04, 1 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There are even multicellular parasites which can cause similar chronic diseases, e.g. schistosomiasis or echinococcosis. The question is in how far these diseases are related to this article. Apart from the fact that some people keep confusing bacteria and viruses, conditions like syphilis and leprosy have nothing to do with slow viruses. Prion diseases haven't either, but they have initially been believed to be viruses, as many scientists could not believe that proteins can be infectious. It doesn't mean that slow bacterial diseases are not interesting, e.g. some researchers believe unknown slow-growing bacteria could be the root cause behind several autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. Slow-growing bacteria are just not slow viruses.

However, there are many more examples of slow viruses, some of them well-known, which are not named in the article. What about hepatitis C, HTLV-1 or - just recently discovered to have real medical relevance to humans - borna disease viruses? Hepatitis D, by contrast, is caused by a virusoid, not a virus, and therefore should not be dealt with in this article (to give another non-example). --2003:E7:7727:B678:1495:47C1:5F30:F615 (talk) 15:15, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not convinced that adding references to these diseases would be helpful for this page. An enormous number of infections can manifest over a wide range of time courses, and I can't see a concise way of determining what falls into the category of 'slow' or not. I think it risks degenerating into a long and useless list of vaguely linked diseases.

I'm also specifically not very comfortable with including Lyme disease in this list. As dealt with well on the page Chronic Lyme disease, the mainstream consensus is that chronic Lyme disease does not exist. 82.41.225.179 (talk) 11:28, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]