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
Bacterial infections can be treated by giving you something that specifically kills bacteria and mostly leaves your body’s cells alone. That is what “antibiotics” are, chemicals that are “anti” or against a “biotic” or living thing. Think about it like leaving out poison to kill pests.
Viruses however are often considered to not even be alive. They are just DNA or RNA instructions contained in a protein coating that is arranged like a trap to inject those instructions into your cells. You can’t kill something that isn’t alive; they don’t eat anything and their protein coatings are very durable. It would be like leaving out poison to try to kill landmines. Not very effective.
When the viruses inject their instructions into your cells it takes over their cellular machinery and makes them construct new viruses, spreading the infection. It is hard to attack them in this stage because those cells are still your cells; they look like your other healthy cells to your body so there isn’t any way to attack them without also killing the rest of you. What we *can* do is give medications that slow down the replication of the viruses by interfering with the replication of DNA and RNA, but those have down sides too because our bodies also use DNA. Think about it like clearing a minefield by whipping the ground with chains to set them off. It clears the mines but it also tends to mess up whatever else you had in the field as well.
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