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
My brain can understand that bacteria are alive while virus are not – but how can something that’s not alive know what to do once inside human body?
How does the virus know?
I’ve not seen anyone specifically mention HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) yet, and it’s a DOOZY of a virus.
Like most other viruses, HIV invades healthy cells and forces replication. So your white blood cells, which normally fight off infection, become little HIV factories which die when they release the copies into your body…
This eventually leads to AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) where HIV has damaged your immune system so much that it just no longer functions as it should.
Antiretroviral therapy (ART) is a treatment – or combination of treatments, which stops the copying process by stopping the replication of the virus – in various different ways – it’s honestly so clever, please look it up!
Anywho, ART eventually leads to the virus becoming “undetectable”, meaning it doesn’t show up in your blood, can no longer damage the immune system and most importantly?
CAN NO LONGER BE TRANSMITTED.
Honestly ART is an absolute miracle of medicine – but the tricky part is still those that don’t have access to testing or medication, or may not even be aware that they have the virus.
As it stands there’s no cure for HIV, the virus just hides itself in a dormant state… If a person on ART stops taking their medication, boom, it’s awake and it starts all over again.
The best we can hope for is medicinal suppression to stop transmission, which could eventually wipe the virus out but that’s not going to be for many many years 🥲
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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