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
Bacteria have an active metabolism of their own, they make their own DNA, they consume nutrients, they are capable of reproduction on their own. This makes it possible to poison them with antibiotics to disrupt their life processes, slow their reproduction, and allow our immune system to finish them off.
Viruses have no metabolism of their own, they just hijack the metabolism of their host to get reproduced. Antibiotics that are deadly to bacteria have no effects on them.
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