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It is often claimed that even though COVID is a very inconsequential disease for people under the age of 16, it is still dangerous to let them get infected as there might be unknown long-term problems down the line. But are there diseases that are in fact known to cause such long-term issues? To clarify, I'm looking for examples of viral diseases where:

  1. Humans (or some groups of people, such as children) recover from the virus quickly and without strong symptoms
  2. Everything seems fine for many months or years
  3. Some major issue pops up in their body several years down the line
JonathanReez
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1 Answers1

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Viruses of the herpes family tend to be capable of causing long-term issues due to their particular habit of latent infections. Shingles is a specific well-known consequence, caused by reactivation of the same virus that causes chickenpox (most often in children). Epstein-Barr virus is another herpesvirus that has been associated with long-term symptoms. Both of these are also associated with illness during the acute phase, but these symptoms are quite different from the long-term symptoms and the acute illness can be quite mild.

HPV are a family of viruses most associated with genital warts, but also cervical and other cancers. In particular, the strains most associated with cancer may produce no notable skin infection at all and the first symptoms of the infection are those related to cancer.

Of course, coronaviruses are not particularly similar to either of these virus families, and worries about long-term effects in youth are mostly being motivated by the long-term symptoms seen with COVID-19 itself, including in young people, not only by hypothetical comparisons to other unrelated viruses. As far as I know so far these are mostly case studies or small single-center studies and not all have been peer-reviewed, like this one and this one, and further study is needed, but some things simply can't be known at this time because the pandemic is only just over a year old.

Bryan Krause
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