Why do we have a lot of antibiotics, but few antiviral meds? I’m not even considering HIV, because I know it’s has a different structure.
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Bacteria cells are quite different from humans cells. Imagine your in a room with lots of people and lots of bugs. (Quite scary yes) You can spray the whole room with soap water and only kill off all the bugs.
As soap water is not harmful to human skin but will seep into and absolutely melt the insides of an insect.
Antibiotics is baisically the same thing, human cells ignore, bacteria cells melt.
Virus is completely opposite. An virus byitself is a very small and inert object thats not alive, so by effect its harder to “kill” it. Think of an virus is like an plant seed. Quite hardy, and what would kill it would kill everything else aswell (we don’t want that). How it reproduce is by injecting its own replication-code inside human cells.
So in this case is like you have a room of lots of people, but some of them believes in cuthulu god and is spreading the idea to every other person. There is nothing you can spray into the room to only kill the cuthulu belivers.
Anti viral med does 2 primary things.
1. They slow down virus transfer. This makes it hard for virus to bind onto your cells. Think of taking the room and creating lots of noise so people can’t hear one another very well. Not the best solution, but helps your immune system catch up.
2. They boost your immune system. Your immune system can fight virus, think of them as thought police, if a human cell shows signs of infection, they terminate them.
Overall, they are still assisting your own immune system, instead of outright killing the bad guys.
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