– why are viral infections so much harder to cure than bacterial infections?

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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

13 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The common cold isn’t one virus. I think it’s common -hahah- knowledge that there are more than 200 of them. Viruses tend to mutate. By the time you’ve defeated one, there’s another version out there.

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