One of the causes of schizophrenia might be the Borna disease virus. There are probably other communicable viruses that contribute to schizophrenia, seeing as how craziness is an attractor in mindspace and what not. This may or may not be a good reason to change some of your habits, but I figured I’d at least clue people in on a possible danger. I think there may be an abnormally high number of people around here that value their minds more than their lives.
Most people shouldn’t worry about it, but those who are already at high risk might want to look further? It’s unclear to me what the value of information is here.
Public advisory: Borna virus and mental disease
One of the causes of schizophrenia might be the Borna disease virus. There are probably other communicable viruses that contribute to schizophrenia, seeing as how craziness is an attractor in mindspace and what not. This may or may not be a good reason to change some of your habits, but I figured I’d at least clue people in on a possible danger. I think there may be an abnormally high number of people around here that value their minds more than their lives.
Most people shouldn’t worry about it, but those who are already at high risk might want to look further? It’s unclear to me what the value of information is here.
Information on the subject is sort of difficult to come by. There’s not much of it. The few papers I’ve read were interesting but many were many decades old. This paper acts as a decent intro to Borna-specific stuff: http://cmr.asm.org/cgi/content/full/16/3/534?view=long&pmid=12857781 . Priors are hard to get.
This is half-supposed to be a set-up to a joke about the “Borna rule” of dating crazy people but I can’t think of a good punch-line.