It's the little things that matter.
Imagine you meet a person. Let's call him Rico. He's alright when he comes into your circle of friends, eventually he will leave. He does no harm, he's just passing by, sometimes even gets forced out. But give him a dark seed, infect him with foul wishes, and he will bring death and destruction to anyone he meets. In the end, it is the person we blame, it is the person that is evil and is therefore hated. Not the seed.
While this may seem random, the same is true for microbes. Vibrio cholerae is a tiny little bacterium that nobody really should mind. Yet when you hear of him, you basically know he causes cholera, a disease that can kill, and even if it doesn't, is at the very least very unpleasant. But he doesn't have to, he doesn't even want to. He just wants to live his life to the fullest, making sure he has plenty of offsprings that look just like him, eating away at anything suitable they might find. They don't want to attack anyone. In a normal situation, they don't. They can infect anyone without causing any symptoms, which is why we don't hear about how safe and harmless it is. Well, mostly harmless.
Because that all changes when it is infected by a virus. The virus isn't just some ordinary cold virus, it is a nasty one, and it aims for V.cholerae with a mighty desire to get under its membrane. Once there, it abuses the bacterium's own proteins to insert some totally badass genes to the bacterium's DNA. These genes include directions to produce a myriad of dangerous toxins. The most famous one: Cholera toxin. But among other genes are other toxins that have similar effect - though through a slightly different action mechanism. Some cause damage to epithelial cells, some weaken the links between them, some activate ion channels in their membranes... but they all cause a sudden efflux of water. That in turn causes severe dehydration that, left untreated, can be fatal. Treatment includes the administering of water. The bacterium itself is safe enough that it gets thrown out by the immune system.
But for some reason little cute V.cholerae gets the blame for doing something that he was forced to do by some nasty virus. You know the virus' motto: 'Your cells under new management', in this case they take over a bacterium and brutally abuse it for evil schemes. It is not even a situation that can be compared to being held at gunpoint and told to do something you don't want to. In that situation you would have a choice - do or die. In the case of this tiny helpless bacterium there is no 'die' option. It is forced to become a weapon of mass excretion. And even so it gets the blame for it, not the bacteriophage that gave him the wherewithal to be evil and forced him to use it. It is quite unfair.
After all, when you think of it, we are talking about a virus that uses an innocent bacterium to attack a giant lifeform, even bring about its death. It can kill a healthy individual without ever even entering a human cell. It doesn't have to. Somehow in its evolution it, a virus that cannot even be seen using a light microscope, has specialized to kill humans by way of bacterium-induced diarrhea. That's amazing, but sort of evil nevertheless. I would not root for the underdog.
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