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Comment by ryanbrunner | Hacker News Reader

There's absolutely viruses that we tolerate currently and take basically no effort to fight, because in the vast, vast majority of the population they're benign. I had an organ transplant a couple of years ago, and as part of that I now have to do monthly blood screening for some of these benign diseases (CMV and BK) since they aren't as benign for someone on strong immunosuppressants.

Maybe this is a selfish thought, but moving towards tolerating diseases objectively increases risk for people like me who can't tolerate diseases to the same extent as others, and others tolerating them more increases the odds that I'll catch them, so this isn't a medical advancement I'm particularly excited about.

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A lot of these benign viruses are turning up in diseases we go on to develop later in life, they might not be benign they just don't kill us right away.

Yes, supposedly quote-on-quote benign not actually proven in fact.

FYI just in case you didn't know, it's "quote unquote", signifying the starting and ending quotation marks.

Since HN has a large number of English language learners in the reader-base I figure this spelling is less likely to induce confusion.

If we're splitting hares, I feel like it's more likely to confuse people whose first language isn't English. Why introduce an incorrect parsing that sounds similar? That's more likely to lead learners astray than help them understand the idiom.

I wouldn't recommend trying to split hares.

Why not? If you've got a hare to butcher, you'd likely want to split it. You could leave the carcass whole and roast it, but that's only one of the many ways to use the animal.

If you want to argue over details that make little difference though, I'd recommend using the term "splitting hairs" instead.

I was jesting but a serious reason why 'quote unquote' may be confusing is the fact that this kind of immediate negation is not considered correct grammar in any other context I know of.

'kind unkind'

'known unknown' (unless your Donald Rumsfeld)

'seen unseen'

etc.

Not my Donald Rumsfeld.

I feel like writing quote-on-quote takes away the ability of non-native speakers to search for and learn the basis of the idiom. I really don't see how it would be more understandable than just typing "quote".

How would it be less likely to induce confusion? What is it even supposed to mean in that form? I had no idea what you were talking about until someone explained your error.

Also when writing (as opposed to talking) you can actually use quotes (as demonstrated by the quotes around "quote unquote"). However in the case of "benign" the quotes are implying, correctly, that it's not benign at all. My preferred method when talking is to use hand signals for quotes, question marks and on occasion, exclamation points.

I think you're responding to your interpretation of the title, rather than the article.

They aren't proposing increasing asymptomatic disease, they're discussing trying to reduce damage done to individuals.

Right, but that shifts treatment of the disease from being mostly focused on elimination to a mixture of elimination (you're right that the article makes it clear that these researchers are not advocating abandoning elimination altogether) and building tolerance. That's inevitably going to shift focus away from trying to rid the patient of the virus when building tolerance is a more productive approach.

Which 100% sounds like the right approach to take and I don't consider this immoral or wrong or anything, just unfortunate.

It's both. You try to prevent the disease, but for those who get infected anyways, you try to improve their tolerance. In fact this research could potentially benefit the immunocompromised the most, in that they can't rely on their immune system to prevent buildup of pathogens so when they get sick they will likely end up with a larger number of pathogens compared to an individual with a healthy immune system. If research can find ways of stopping that larger buildup from damaging the body, then being immunocompromised is no longer as dangerous for the individual.

However, for those that have a weak immune response and also don't or can't get this new tolerance treatment, it would be a net negative, on that I can agree.

CMV is also strongly associated with pregnancy complications

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