Stealth-adapted virus

:This article is about biological viruses. For stealth computer viruses, see .
The term stealth-adapted virus is used to describe cell damaging (cytopathic) viruses that lack genes coding for antigens targeted by the cellular immune system. Infection with stealth-adapted viruses do not evoke the inflammatory reaction typical of most cytopathic viruses. Missing antigenic proteins enable stealth viruses to escape recognition by the immune system. Atypically-structured cell-damaging viruses were initially proposed by W. John Martin, M.D., Ph.D., who introduced the term 'stealth viruses' to highlight their evasion of effective immune recognition.
Martin has hypothesized that stealth viruses are contributing to increasingly prevalent diseases, such as autism and learning disorders in children, chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia in adults; and neurodegenerative illnesses in the elderly. Stealth viruses can infect many organs, but the brain is especially susceptible to the effects of even limited localized cellular damage. Stealth virus induced encephalopathies are probably heavily influenced by the timing of infection. Cancer has been added to the list of potential stealth virus-associated diseases.
Prevalence
Indications of the likely prevalence of stealth virus infection, among apparently healthy individuals, has come from studies Martin conducted on student blood donors attending a college campus. Just under 10% of the units tested gave a positive result.
Diagnosis
A major challenge in providing medical care for afflicted patients is the diverse clinical manifestations of the patients' illnesses, which do not easily fit into a single medical discipline. Imprecise diagnostic labels tend to obscure the complex multi-system nature of the patients' illnesses. Another difficulty is quantitating the severity of disease processes that can vary widely over time, and can be influenced by such non-specific factors as stress, environmental exposures to chemicals, placebo effects, etc.

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