Eli5: Why does it seems that the only „cure“ for a flu/flu-like infection is rest?

Question

I mean nowdays it seems we have so much medicine and ways to cure different diseases, why is the only thing I can do currently to rest in bed?

In: 3

Answer 1

Alot of the symptoms of the flu aren’t from the virus itself, it’s from your immune system response to the virus. So technically we could make you feel better by turning off your immune system, but you need it to work to kill off the virus so it would just make you feel a bit better untill the virus killed you.

So we’re kinda left with medicines that prevent the virus from working, and fun fact, we do a treatment for the flu! Its called osteltamivir (Tamiflu); the way it works is important so bear with me.

Influenza virus enters your cells by sticking to protiens on the surface of your cells and then gets absorbed into your cell where it uses your cell’s machinery to replicate. After a while, it has to leave your cell; some viruses do this by popping your cells like a balloon by influenza viruses just kinda push their way out of your cell’s membrane without popping the cell itself. But then it has an issue, the virus has a ton of sticky stuff on its surface so it just ended up to the cell it came from. The virus’s solution is basically to carry a pair of sissors so it can cut itself free from the surface of the cell. Tamiflu works by stopping the pair of sissors from working.

After a couple days of the infection your immune system gets pretty good at killing off the actual viruses that end up floating around in your blood but there are still a bunch of viruses inside your cells that your immune system has to take care of. Since that means any viruses outside of your cells are killed off as quick as the show up, tamiflu isn’t actually helpful unless you give it to someone really early on in the infection (it only works if you give it to someone in the first two days of feeling sick). But you still have to kill off the cells that are full of viruses so your immune system stays in overdrive. And since most of the symptoms come from your immune system it means you end up feeling sick for ages afterwards.

And tbh, theres a bunch of controversy around tamiflu at the moment becuase in reality it just doens’t work all that well (at best it makes you feel better a couple days earlier than you would have without it) and it can make you feel pretty sick all on its own.