Question: what type of viruses are dangerous to cells

Carolyn Nielsen answered on 17 Nov 2015:

If you think about what the best, most successful virus would be.. it would be one that can infect as many people as possible, right? A virus that immediately kills a person wouldn’t be successful in that sense because the person wouldn’t be around long enough to infect other people and keep the virus spreading. So strangely, it’s to the advantage of the virus not to destroy all your cells.

But to answer your question, when a virus infects a cell, the outcomes can be broadly grouped into those that lead to cytocidal infections (cyto=cell, cidal=killing, like homocide or suicide), those that cause persistent latent infections (virus hides out in the cell without much replication and doesn’t kill cell), and those that cause transformation of the cell (don’t kill the cell but cause changes that can lead to cancer).

So it would be the cytocidal viral infections that are most dangerous to cells, such as some herpes viruses. Confusingly though, herpes viruses can also establish latent infections in cells!