why do viruses try to kill the thing keeping them alive?
In: Biology
Afaik biology or virology, they are not really trying to kill anyone off. At their microscopic level, they don’t even know that humans exist, that is if virus is conscious at all.
All that viruses do is trying to replicate. It’s just that the replication process is often at the expense of the host. Harming or kill the host is quite purely incidental if you will.
The viruses that we study tend to be heavily skewed towards those that makes us sick.
There are a lot of viruses that are just harmlessly floating around and may even be beneficial for humans to get infected with. A lot of these are poorly understood, since a lot less people are interested in studying them, as there’s less money to be made from these harmless viruses and bacterias.
They don’t. In fact they try very hard to make their hosts just sick enough to spread them more efficiently. The deadly ones mostly screw up by being in the wrong host.
Covid is a perfect example of this. The exact same virus in a bat would have given them a runny nose, but it landed humans in the ICU or at the very least knocked us flat on our backs for a couple weeks. As the pandemic went on and the virus mutated, it became less and less deadly until it got to the point that if you catch Covid today it’s basically a really bad cold.
Viruses don’t “try” to do anything. They don’t have brains. They aren’t even technically made of true cells. They merely do what their dna has programmed them to do, which is enter a cell and commandeer it for reproduction. Now the be clear, evolution generally selects for viruses that don’t kill their host. When viruses do kill their host at a high, it’s usually because the virus jumped to a different animal species than the one it evolved to. Ebola is a good example. It doesn’t seem to wipe out entire families of bats when they have it. But it’s really deadly in humans. But that’s because humans aren’t really a host is evolved to thrive in. Typically when a virus jumps to a new host, that lineage either dies off as it kills all of its hosts, or it evolves over time to become less deadly. We’re experiencing this now with COVID. The Syrians that exist today are nowhere near as deadly as the ones from the first two years.
I mean, why do you? Cows are big enough you could have probably sliced off a slice and not killed it to make your burger but you ate a whole potato and murdered it instantly. Killing the thing you live off of seems standard
The viruses adapted to infect human like herpes are very good at living in you without killing you.
A virus adapted to give a cow a mild flu will give a human deadly symptoms as the virus still thinks its in a cow and your own immune system is also unprepared for such a new and aggressive invader.
It’s funny you say this. Recently, there have been breakthroughs in virology after extensive research. There are viruses in human cells that actually lay dormant and fight off harmful bacteria and viruses. Some viruses are also responsible for reinforcing and strengthening our cells in times of need.
Same way humans try to kill the planet . They don’t fucking know what they’re doing . Just multiply and die . We’re a goddamn parasite ourselves
Viruses don’t normally try to kill a host. But the host body has reactions to a virus, and those reactions are usually what kills the host, especially in a zero day virus that the host body has no information about how to fight. It’s almost like the host body declares nuclear war on the virus in an attempt to rid the body of it, and that kills the host. This is why unknown viruses are so dangerous, and why simply letting them get you sick is an incredibly bad idea. All these people during COVID saying to just go get sick, stupid idea.
You could ask a similar question: Why do humans knowingly destroy their only planet they can live on?
The reasons are probably a little bit different, but I think it’s an interesting comparison.
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