Most DNA viruses embody the opposite extremes. Their mutation rates are low and their population sizes can be relatively small. Their strategies of self-perpetuation “tend to go for this persistence route,” Eddie said. Persistence and stealth. They lurk, they wait. They hide from the immune system rather than trying to outrun it. They go dormant and linger within certain cells, replicating little or not at all, sometimes for many years. I knew he was talking about things like varicella zoster virus, a classic DNA virus that begins its infection of humans as chickenpox and can recrudesce,
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