It's almost certain that EBV has no benefit. We have a nice control group of people without EBV and as far as I'm aware absolutely no benefit is apparent.
Agreeing with you but it's crazy to see people hand-wave "EBV is fine".
Everyone seems to have to go through life the hard way where "nothing is a problem don't overreact" until suddenly it's destroying your life and then it's too late.
EBV can turn to mono and once your body is making auto-antibodies you are screwed for a long time, maybe the rest of your life because your quality of life is just gone. It will keep coming back every time you get weakened.
How about VZV turning into shingles? If you ever had a shingles attack it will change your whole perspective for life on illness and pain. If you could eradicate VZV from your body to prevent that you most certainly should, EBV too.
Indeed. It seems quite insane to me. That a virus that causes hundreds of thousands of cancers and many more debilitating illnesses every year could be reasonably expected to be fine, let alone beneficial is just baffling to me.
The non-carriers are not a control group unless we are 100% sure that the assignment is random. I find it hard to believe when the vast majority of population are carriers.
It's not random. More developed countries and richer people in more developped countries have a lower incidence rate. The chance of catching it increases with age. The part of the population that doesn't catch it seems to be avoiding it by luck, higher hygiene, and fewer vectors. See: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/208/8/1286/2192838
The first recorded appendectomy is in 1880. Probably the first major study conclusively indicating adverse consequences was published in 2014.
It did hold for a long time, until it didn't because we found scientific evidence that said the opposite. Are you really so confident that no such evidence could ever be found for anything else? There is so much we don't know about the human body.
That's really not it. There is a heavy bias that the appendix is somehow beneficial because we evolved to keep it for some reason (though it could have been just a relic).
EBV is a virus. Our immune system does whatever it can to get rid of it. It causes significant illness. There is absolutely no reason to believe it is beneficial whatsoever.
If you think it is, you can prove it. We have literally hundreds of millions of people walking around that never got EBV. Go on, and find a statistically significant way in which EBV is beneficial for them. You have the burden of proof here.
If that bias is so strong, why did people believe the appendix was vestigial for a 100 years?
If the immue system does "whatever it can" to get rid of EBV, why is it happy to let EBV lie dormant in most people who have it?
Most of what you said can be said about bacteria too. It turns out bacteria can be helpful and blindly applying antibiotics is linked to the rise of numerous autoimmune diseases. It took quite a long time for us to figure it out.
I think the burden of proof is on the people who want to modify other people's bodies (i.e. prophylactic EBV vaccination). You can do what you want to yourself. But unless we want to repeat the mistakes of the recent past we should be ~really~ sure there is no reason the body keeps it around lying dormant. One could even say this is a larger "control group" than the one you are talking about.
Besides, correlational medical studies can't even determine if eggs and coffee are good or bad for you. If we really want to answer these questions adequately, we need better tools.
The immune system isn't happy to let EBV dormant. EBV infects the immune system in order to lie dormant. It hides inside long-lived B-cells in a way that is impossible for your immune system to see from the outside, so there is no way to mount an efficient response at that point.
Again, we knew about side effects for antibiotics from the get-go. It's link to autoimmune diseases specifically is recent because autoimmune diseases were misunderstood. We knew that bacteria could be beneficial and necessary from before we had the first antibiotic.
If we can't tell if eggs or coffee are bad for you, it's because there just isn't a strong correlation either way, and diet studies are not very good at deriving signal.
Thankfully, simply comparing people that are and aren't infected is a much clearer signal.
Again, this isn't hard. We've been able to associate dozens of negative outcomes to EBV infection. We would be able to figure out a positive outcome.
The idea that "the body keeps it around" just completely flies in the face of reality. The fact is, the body doesn't really have a way of preventing it from staying there.
Everyone seems to have to go through life the hard way where "nothing is a problem don't overreact" until suddenly it's destroying your life and then it's too late.
EBV can turn to mono and once your body is making auto-antibodies you are screwed for a long time, maybe the rest of your life because your quality of life is just gone. It will keep coming back every time you get weakened.
How about VZV turning into shingles? If you ever had a shingles attack it will change your whole perspective for life on illness and pain. If you could eradicate VZV from your body to prevent that you most certainly should, EBV too.