Which of the following statements best supports the hypothesis that viruses can cause cancer?

Cancer is a condition caused by unregulated division of abnormal cells in parts of the body. For a virus to survive in an organism, it must enter into the host’s cell and take control of the cell’s most activities in order to be able to reproduce and replicate.

Some of the viruses achieve this by inserting their DNA or RNA to that of the host cell. This has a highly likelihood of affecting the DNA or RNA of a host (living organism) which alters their genes, which may lead to host cells becoming cancerous.

For this reason, viruses can cause cancer because the genes that regulate cell division in host cell are found in some viruses.

The AIDS virus (HIV virus) is Class VI or Group VI in the Baltimore Classification. Based on the Baltimore Classification, this specifically involves the reverse transcriptase enzyme and it is encoded by the virus.

This is the enzyme that will produce DNA molecules from the viral RNA. This is the mechanism involved where it will use the reverse transcriptase enzyme to insert viral DNA into the genetic material of the host cell.

The disease-causing microorganisms are known as pathogens, which include bacteria, fungi, protozoa, worms, viruses and prions. These organisms have distinguishing cell structures from each other. The most notable difference between viruses and other pathogens is that viruses lack a metabolism mechanism of their own and ability to produce proteins encoded by their DNA or RNA. However, they viruses rely on machinery of the host cell to produce their proteins and replicate their genomes.