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

If you want to kill a virus inside a human you would like to do it in a way that does not kill the human. It is the killed virus but not the human part that is hard.

You kill a virus or bacteria with disinfectants with chemical reactions that destroy their membranes but it works as good on human cells. The skin can survive it because it is tougher then other cells and the outer layer is dead cells but if you ingest or inject it you will kill lots of human cells.

So any simple way would kill the human long before the virus. You for example like an over 60% alcohol in hand sanitizer. A blood alcohol level of 0.5% is classified as “High possibility of death” So the human is dead long before viruses.

For bacteria, you use antibiotics that are targeted and block specific chemical reactions in bacteria that do not occur in human cells. A virus as technically not alive outside of host cells and when it infects a cell it uses the human cells to manufacture copies of it. This make it hard to kill a virus in a human because what they do is injecting RNA in a cell and let is do th work.

So the best way we know to kill viruses in a human is to educate the immune system in how to handle it itself so it knows what antibodies to make, this is what a vaccine does.