INFECT

[verb] [T] - to cause illness by the movement of an organism into a living thingThe ward was full of children infected with TB.All the tomato plants are infected with a virus.(figurative) A computer virus may lurk unseen in a computer's memory, calling up and infecting each of the machine's data files in turn. [T](figurative) When hysteria about AIDS first infected the media in the early Eighties, those identified as vulnerable were all at the margins of society. [T]