Safaa Alkhawaja
A latent infection is an infection that is hidden, inactive, or dormant. As opposed to active infections, where a virus or bacterium is actively replicating and potentially causing symptoms, latent infections are essentially static. Viral latency is the ability of a pathogenic virus to lie dormant within a cell, denoted as the lysogenic part of the viral life cycle. A latent viral infection is a type of persistent viral infection which is distinguished from a chronic viral infection.