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Question

Why are the fast-evolving viruses relatively benign?
– BorgClown, 2009-04-30 at 00:49:55 (9 comments)

	On 2009-04-30 at 00:53:31, BorgClown wrote... Relevant to these times, flu viruses evolve very fast and spread widely, yet the flu is relatively benign to other virus-caused diseases, like hepatitis or HIV. Imagine a HIV flu, lots and lots of deaths...
	On 2009-04-30 at 00:53:49, BorgClown wrote... *compared to other
	On 2009-04-30 at 02:08:03, Baslisks wrote... that would be interesting...
	On 2009-04-30 at 02:08:15, Baslisks wrote... to know... forgot to add my ending.
	On 2009-04-30 at 08:19:41, Lee J Haywood wrote... Benign viruses out-compete lethal variants simply because the lethal ones don't give themselves enough time to spread. I'd guess that fast-mutating viruses make this transition very quickly, whereas something like TB took a long time to gradually become less harmful. One thing that always seems to be ignored is that a virus mutates as it copies from one cell to another, not only when going from one individual to another. Perhaps the airborne virus particles are predominately the non-mutated ones, and perhaps they can mutate whilst making the transition between hosts, but you'd still expect errors during replication, i.e. inside the body.
	On 2009-05-01 at 01:03:14, BorgClown wrote... That's why I picked an HIV flu. Easy to spread, slow to incubate, and usually lethal. If biological weapons were legal, imagine the mostrosities that could be brewed with modern genetic engineering.
	On 2009-05-01 at 16:49:08, Baslisks wrote... Imagine the wonder that we could instill with modern bioengineering. We could create a whole new world.Base it off of benign viruses that create wonderful structures of pure bliss. The future can be awesome.
	On 2009-05-02 at 01:22:59, BorgClown wrote... That's a dangerous kind of bugs to have software bugs, though.
	On 2009-05-02 at 01:23:09, BorgClown wrote... I still prefer nanobots.