Was wondering if maybe they don’t cause any specifically unique harms and what emerges as different effects or illnesses merely come down to which specific cells they takeover and the speed in which they do it.
In other words the death of cells in reality cause illness. (Along with activity and overreaction by our immune system?)… So for example, if something else (e.g. poison) killed the same cells, then would the results might be the same as a virus destroying those cells?
In: Biology
Seems like you answered your own question. Many of the symptoms/effects of viruses (or any other infective agent) are due to the non-specific efforts of your body to get rid of the virus (i.e “flu-like symptoms”). But yes, the specific effects viruses have on us is due to the kinds of cells they infect. So, polio affects nerves and causes paralysis, and HIV infects immune system cells and makes you susceptible to other disease the immune system can no longer fight. Or, your body responds differently based on where the infection is. This is why you get a cough from a cold virus and not diarrhea.
There are so many different kinds of viruses! Viruses usually hook up with something on the surface of cells and use that to get into the cells. Different viruses pick different surface targets, so different viruses enter different cells in different organs. Some viruses are more promiscuous than others!
On top of that, different viruses can cause different amounts or kinds of damage. For example, rhinovirus seems to cause almost no large scale damage to your body — almost everything that happens in a cold is your immune system reacting to the rhinovirus during the ‘common cold’. That is different from influenza, which actually can kill a lot of cells and cause damage, even though they both hit your respiratory system. So some viruses don’t kill a lot of cells, and others kill a ton of cells!
Factor in that your immune system can react different ways to damage and pathogens, with different kinds and degrees of immune response. So in the case of your example, taking a poison that kills the same cells, my answer would be that the effect to your body would not be like a viral infection targeting those cells. That is because the immune response to cell death (without a detectable pathogen around) is different than when there is a pathogen detected!
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