They’re not living organisms, so what are they? What created them; where did they come from? Why do they infect hosts? Bacterial infections make sense; bacteria use a host’s body to survive and propagate. Viruses aren’t alive, though, so why do they need to infect people at all?
And why do they all affect the body so differently? Why can you only catch some viruses (I.e. chickenpox) once, but you can catch others (Covid, flu) multiple times? Why do some (HPV, EBV) appear to cause cancers and autoimmune disorders while others don’t?
For as far as we’ve come in medicine, it seems like we don’t understand much at all about viruses, or their longterm implications.
In: 0
you can look at the success of an organism by how successful it is at propagating it’s genome; that’s survival of the fittest, an animal with good genes survives and breeds and their genes live on in their offspring.
A virus is a genome without a body; they’re genes, and they seek to propagate themselves by making more copies of those genes. The ones that find new ways to infect and copy themselves are the ones that continue to spread. They do so by hijacking the cellular machinery of living cells and rewrite the code of the cell to become a virus factory
Viruses also evolve. The copy system isn’t perfect, it makes mistakes sometimes, each mistake is a novel **mutation**. The mutations that make the viral gene better at spreading go on to have more success, and so the virus changes over time.
not all viruses change at the same rate, viruses like the flu change a lot, have a lot of different flu mutations that are all slightly different, and they continue to change rapidly, so these new versions are able to infect people even fi they had previously had a different version
ones that don’t change much are easier to stop with vaccines, and if we get a very large percent of people vaccinated then that virus no longer can spread among the population
Latest Answers