Are viruses becoming nastier?

[Manks]

About six weeks ago, I began having trouble digesting food and feeling full the whole time. This morphed into a "gastric flu" type thing with nausea and diarrhea which came and went. So I saw my GP who did a few checks and declared it to be a virus.

A week or so passed and no improvement, so I went to another GP. More checks and I was told again that it was probably a nasty virus.

It's now been six weeks and I am feeling better day by day, but still feel nauseous occasionally and am mentally below par. So I am assuming that it WAS a bad virus.

In the past five years my wife or I have had, for maybe a couple of weeks at a time, a minor sore throat or the sniffles accompanied by a feeling of just being very low and run down. There have been no external factors that should have caused it. We have put it down to unidentified and not particularly serious viral infections.

Up until about five years ago though, once you'd had the "one-offs" like measles, mumps and chicken pox there were relatively few "common" illnesses to catch. You could have flu, a cold or a tummy bug. That was about it and they rarely took more than a week to clear.

It seems to me, though, that these days there are more weird viruses about and they are a lot more potent. For example there was a spate about two years ago locally of people getting a viral throat infection that took several months to clear.

So, has anyone else noticed this? Are viruses becoming nastier?