Most viruses have no cure… What does this imply?

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Most viruses have no cure… What does this imply?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The thing about modern medicine is that it requires you expose *yourself* to the cure as well. There are an absurd amount of things that will kill diseases in a petri dish but can’t be shot into a human vein safely. So most medicines need to work by exploiting very specific differences in physiology to ensure their toxic effects just aren’t applicable to humans. For example, many antibiotics are toxins that cause damage to the bacteria’s cell wall –since animal cells don’t have cell walls, those toxins can’t harm us directly.

Finding these exploitable differences becomes harder as the invading disease becomes 1) more human, or 2) more simplistic. In the case of viruses, they’re just a chain of DNA or RNA packed into a basic ass protein shell. And the protein shell itself even varies from virus to virus. So since “some sort of DNA/RNA” and “some sort of protein” is about as universal as life gets, as a result there are no natural drugs that can damage viruses while still being remotely safe for human consumption. We can create antibody drugs that tag viruses for breakdown by the host’s own immune system, however these drugs only work on specific strains, are extremely expensive to bring to market, and tend to have short shelf life once thawed, so they’re only ever bought and used by hospitals for life-threatening situations.

Anonymous 0 Comments

75% of our DNA information is about how to resist past viral diseases, our bodies constantly are creating cures against viruses.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It doesn’t *imply* anything. It means that human immune system is good at keeping check on many viral infections, especially after the initial ones. Some viruses are especially good at hiding in inaccessible tissues like nerves, and they are very hard for immune system to get rid of because it can’t get there. Some infections become dormant – the immune system recognizes infected cells who are misbehaving, but not the viral material inside the cell if it doesn’t do anything for a while. And some of viral DNA is permanently incorporated in our DNA (around 8%, and many more sequences seem to have viral origin too).

Anonymous 0 Comments

From what I understand their aren’t cures or vaccines for viruses because they evolve really fast.