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Destruction of the last securely stored viruses is an irrevocable action that should occur only when the global community has eliminated the threat of smallpox once and for all. To do any less keeps future generations at risk from the re-emergence of one of the deadliest diseases humanity has ever known.
Viruses are small infectious agents that can replicate only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all forms of life, including animals , plants , fungi , bacteria and archaea . They are found in almost every ecosystem on Earth and are the most abundant type of biological entity, with millions of different types, although only ...
Whether or not viruses should be considered as alive is controversial. [ 35 ] [ 36 ] They are most often considered as just gene coding replicators rather than forms of life. [ 37 ] They have been described as "organisms at the edge of life" [ 38 ] because they possess genes , evolve by natural selection, [ 39 ] [ 40 ] and replicate by making ...
The English plural is viruses (sometimes also vira), [18] whereas the Latin word is a mass noun, which has no classically attested plural (vīra is used in Neo-Latin [19]). The adjective viral dates to 1948. [20]
According to Paul Thacker (writing for the British Medical Journal), some scientists and reporters said that "objective consideration of COVID-19's origins went awry early in the pandemic, as researchers who were funded to study viruses with pandemic potential launched a campaign labelling the lab leak hypothesis as a 'conspiracy theory.'" [34 ...
A classified report from May 2020 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a US government national laboratory, concluded that the hypothesis that the virus leaked from the WIV "is plausible and deserves further investigation", although the report also notes that the virus could have developed naturally, echoing the consensus of the ...
Gamma phage, an example of virus particles (visualised by electron microscopy) Virology is the scientific study of biological viruses.It is a subfield of microbiology that focuses on their detection, structure, classification and evolution, their methods of infection and exploitation of host cells for reproduction, their interaction with host organism physiology and immunity, the diseases they ...
Viruses are often isolated from the initial patient sample. This allows the virus sample to be grown into larger quantities and allows a larger number of tests to be run on them. This is particularly important for samples that contain new or rare viruses for which diagnostic tests are not yet developed.