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JackJack65 t1_izhln6v wrote

No, viruses aren't required for humans to stay alive. Viruses often kill the cells they infect, and at no point does the body depend on viral infection for normal development.

That said, in practice, there are some viruses that nearly every human gets exposure to, that are considered desirable to get exposed to at a young age (to avoid complications of getting exposed at a later point in time). Cytomegalovirus, for example, does not cause severe disease in young people when they are exposed, and the body has the chance to build up antigen-specific immunity, but if a woman is exposed to cytomegalovirus for the first time during pregnancy, this can have serious complications for the developing child.

Likewise, the five endemic human coronaviruses (OC43, NL63, HKU1, 229E, SARS-CoV-2), influenza A virus, varicella zoster virus (which causes chickenpox), are so widespread that there is a virtual guarantee that you will be exposed at some point during your life, therefore it is important to develop antigen-specific immunity to these (ideally by vaccination; ideally when you are young and healthy) to avoid the dangerous complications that can occur, especially if you are exposed for the first time at an older age.

At any given point in time, there are always billions of bacteriophages replicating inside you. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria and are widespread throughout the whole world. The human digestive tract is sterile at birth, but is quickly colonized in the first few days of life by bacteria that bring bacteriophages with them. Bacteriophages cannot infect human cells, so their effect is primarily on their bacterial hosts, not us directly. (Humans can survive and develop without gut bacteria if they are kept in sterile conditions, so in no way are these bacteriophages essential for human life.) Since most of the bacteria in your body is in your gut and on your skin, bacteriophages may play a role in killing some bacterial families allowing other types of bacterial families to fluorish, which could be good or bad, depending on the situation, something scientists have tried to harness to combat dangerous bacteria (with something called phage therapy).

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