For most bacterial (and even fungal) infections, we’ve developed medications you can take and the infection is gone in a few days.
But most viruses remain completely untreatable. The best we can do is develop treatments that manage the symptoms, or vaccines that boost your body’s natural defense and make it somewhat less likely that you’ll get infected, or if you do get infected it’ll be a less severe case.
The flu, COVID, RSV, swine flu, bird flu, HIV, Ebola, even the common cold. We don’t really have a “cure” for any of them. Why not?
What’s different about a virus that makes it so much harder to just develop a pill you can pop to make it go away?
In: Biology
We do have antiviral medications. The thing about most viral infections is your body is quite adept at fighting off the virus. It’s only when the symptoms of the virus are deadly or you are physically compromised in a way where you may not survive the symptoms. A healthy person can fight off most viral infections in 3-5 days. The window where it makes sense to take antivirals
AND it’s become clear that you actually need the medication is pretty narrow so we use them less often. Bacterial infections, or at least the ones we treat with abx, are ones that the body will not fight off on its own so the medications were developed out of necessity.
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