3rd October: Virus Appreciation Day

Today is Virus Appreciation Day. Here are some facts about viruses to help you appreciate them.

1. The word virus comes from the Latin word for “poison” or “slimy liquid”.
2. There has been some debate over whether they are actually living things or not. They don't fulfil several of the criteria for life - they do not have cells and they cannot turn food into energy. Until they infect something, they're just inert packets of chemicals. On the other hand, they reproduce and evolve.
3. The first virus ever to be discovered was the Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV) discovered by a Russian Microbiologist, Dmitry Ivanovsky in 1892. In 1946, American biochemist Wendell Stanley purified this virus into crystals of protein, which won him a Nobel Prize - in chemistry, not medicine.
4. The first human virus was discovered in 1901 - the yellow fever virus, by Walter Reed. It was 1933 before the influenza virus was isolated.
5. Viruses range in size from 20 nanometres (0.00002 millimetres) to 400 nanometres. The smallest are circoviruses. The largest were discovered in 1992, inside amoeba in a cooling tower in England. It was so big scientists thought it was a Bacteria at first. French biologist Didier Raoult, who helped sequence its genome, dubbed it Mimivirus, after a children's story his father used to read to him - Mimi the Amoeba. Mimivirus has an even larger French cousin, Mamavirus, which has been found in an amoeba in a cooling tower in Paris.
6. Viruses infect everything - animals, plants, fungi, protozoa, archaea, bacteria, and even each other.
7. While some viruses cause nasty diseases like HIV, Ebola, influenza and even some types of cancer, not all viruses are bad. The ones which infect bacteria, for example, have been used in diagnosis and treatments of infections from bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella.
8. Half of our own DNA originally came from viruses which infected our ancestors millions of years ago. You could even say we are all descended from viruses. Most of them are extinct - they just sit there and don't do anything, but others may help prevent a mother's immune system from attacking her baby. Scientists have been able to use this viral DNA to track how the human race migrated in prehistoric times. By looking at the modern day distribution of a virus called HTLV, it has been determined that the first people to reach the Americas, millennia ago, were Japanese sailors. In 2005, some French scientists reactivated an extinct virus. It was controversial - there were fears it could cause an epidemic of some kind, but they did it anyway. Luckily, the virus, which they dubbed Phoenix, was harmless.
9. There are a lot of viruses - they outnumber all other life forms on the planet. In just one millilitre of seawater there are a million virus particles. If you lined up all the viruses on earth end to end, they would stretch 200 million light years into space.
10. One type of virus which definitely isn't alive is the computer virus, named because they operate in a similar way to the others - they infect computers, usually via infected e-mails or discs, and replicate themselves within the host computer. Again, some are harmless but others can completely wreck a computer. They've been around since 1971 when a programmer called Bob Thomas created the first one, known as the Creepy Virus.

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