I understand that viruses can be suppressed by the immune system – but it seems most tend to continue living in our bodies and we only get “sick” from them when our immune systems are weakened.
Why can’t we create a cure that eradicates the virus from the body? Not talking about retroantivirals.
In: Biology
It’s trivially easy to get rid of every virus in the body. You can use bleach, you can use really high heat, you can use all sorts of things.
Oh. You want the body to survive, huh? Well, that’s a lot harder.
The problem with viruses is that in order to “kill” them, you have to find a way to interact with them that doesn’t interact with other things in the body – at least not too much. The number of systems in your body means you need to be very specific in what you do, but the speed at which viruses mutate means you need to be very *broad* in what you do. These two things are at odds, and it’s one of the main difficulties of designing antiviral treatments.
Viruses invade your cells and live *inside* them. Any treatments are going to affect the cell first before the virus inside of it, which makes it tougher.
A virus is a relatively small, almost inert chemical, that can hide inside a human cell making it virtually invisible. To eliminate it, you have to find it, which is normally only possible when it is active. You could of course kill all the cells in the body where it could be hiding, but that would mean killing the body.
viruses “live” in cells, to eradicate the virus, you’d have to eradicate from the cells, possibly damaging cells that benefit the alive condition.
Many viruses actually inject their own RNA into the cells they invade, which is then actually *incorporated* into that cell’s genome. These are called Retroviruses, an example of which is Chicken Pox.
Under certain conditions, these genes then re-activate and start producing the virus again, or they express and begin causing the body problems. An example of this is Shingles, which happens if you’ve previously infected by chicken pox.
Some other examples of these include herpes and HIV/AIDS.
Viruses are extremely small compared to bacteria and the cells in your body. They also aren’t actually alive. They’re just some kind of protein/lipid structure wrapping either DNA or, usually, RNA. they don’t generate energy or move at all. They just float around.
A good way to think of viruses is they are like your side chick’s hair in your apartment. It’s so small and hard to see that you usually can’t get rid of all of it. So when your girlfriend’s over, there’s always the risk that she’s going to find your side chicks hair and quickly realize that neither of you are blonde. You could vacuum your apartment 100 times and still miss it.
The difference is that viruses do fall apart and your body does develop antibodies for the purpose of getting rid of them. It also has other mechanisms to completely eliminate them. Sometimes these mechanisms can take a long time. For example HPV is typically cleared completely within two years. most viruses can’t even bond to any of your cells anyway, but, of the ones that can, most of them will be completely wiped out by your immune system in a relatively short period of time.
However there are certain viruses that manage to evade your immune system for life. This can be for a couple of different reasons. One reason are a class of viruses called retroviruses which infect healthy cells and don’t always destroy the cells. So they can lay dormant and hidden for long periods of time. HIV is an example of this. They’re actually large sections of our DNA which are just inactivated relics from old retroviruses from ages ago. Other examples are viruses that find themselves in places which have very little blood flow so they can keep a population alive without getting wiped out. A good example of this is herpes. It hides out in your nerves which have very little blood flow in that region. Therefore they’re not exposed to a lot of antibodies. This is also how rabies can stay undetected for weeks or even sometimes months before finally making its way into your brain.
Its kind of possible now with bone marrow transplants.
HIV is a blood virus. Your blood cells are created by stem cells in the bone marrow. You basically nuke the body with radiation and chemo, so that all the stem cells die. Then you transplant donor cells from a matching individual. The stem cells take hold in the marrow and start producing cells with your donors dna. The new cells see your old blood cells as foreign and attack them. This is how some blood cancers are treated
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36807684/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36807684/)
Many viruses, like HIV, integrate into our DNA or hide in tissues, making them notoriously difficult to eradicate completely from the body.
Latest Answers