Most viruses have no cure… What does this imply?
In: 0
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.
Latest Answers