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.
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.