How can disinfectants kill viruses so easily but they are hard to kill when inside someone

Question

How can disinfectants kill viruses so easily but they are hard to kill when inside someone

In: Biology

Answer 1

By their nature, disinfectants are harmful to humans inside the body; their purpose is to kill or deactivate biological matter. If you were to drink bleach it’d certainly kill any viruses it came in to contact with. In addition to that, it’d literally burn straight through your body, dissolving all your organs along the way.

That’s the conundrum with fighting off a virus once it’s already inside the body:

1. The amount of self-replicating viral particles is way too large to possibly target them individually.

2. Any solutions which would kill off the viral particles inside en masse would also inherently destroy the body itself.