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Comment by zecg | Hacker News Reader

Epstein-Barr virus is close to that ideal, 90-95% of adults have it. Unfortunately, it's connected with cancers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein%E2%80%93Barr_virus

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90-95% of adults had it at some point. Most people develop immunity to it and so it doesn't survive in them. I'd say the most successful virus in humans would be the common cold, given how frequently we seem to get it, although it's more of a massive family of virii.

No actually once you have it, you have it forever.

   EBV latently persists in the individual's B cells for the rest of the individual's life [1]

[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15546128

jbogp, I'd be interested to chat with you about your experience interviewing with DeepMind (found that searching HN for DeepMind info). My contact info is on my user profile page. Sorry about the thread-jack.

Virii is a nonsense word. Unless, Virius was your original reference word.

I'm afraid that battle is long lost now :(.

Why do you think so? Virii doesn't seem that much more common than viri or viruses.

Herpes Simplex is another example. A majority of americans are carriers.

That can only be transmitted in one direction. Its Herpes Duplex you have to worry about.

The common cold describes a bunch of symptoms that can be triggered by quite a few different viruses.

There is some evidence that we went full borg on at least some viruses and assimilated them into our cell machinery: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15310846

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