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
viruses hijack our cells to reproduce which makes it tough to treat them without affecting our own cells, in contrast antibiotics can target bacteria specifically. That’s why we rely on vaccines and managing symptoms for viral infections
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