why do viruses try to kill the thing keeping them alive?
In: Biology
They don’t. All viruses want to use their host to make more of themselves. Most hosts want to get rid of the virus. The immune response is often wheat makes viruses dangerous to us if the virus is string enough.
When viruses themselves are deadly, it’s usually because the virus made a jump to a different species, and it doesn’t realize what it’s doing it deadly. This is why, over time, an individual virus becomes less deadly to a species. The common cold is the same kind of virus as covid-19, but it has been circulating among humans for so long, that it’s no longer dangerous to us. Covid-19 made the jump to humans in 2019 and now it’s 2024, and in addition to us getting better at fighting it, there are also plenty of variants now that are less deadly to us, and that’s just 5 years.
To my knowledge viruses are neither considered living nor non living because they don’t respond to stimuli sufficiently either way I think that kind of nulls this question void. I wouldn’t say that they do in the first place. Just my two cents
Viruses don’t “try” anything. Viruses require hosts to replicate. When they are in the right position the nature of their genetics allows them to be absorbed by a cell and they have the means to incorporate into the cell operations thus spitting out copies of the virus.
If there is so much replication that it overwhelms the host, the host can certainly die, however, most Viruses will shed from the host in various ways and get ejected into the environment where it can infect a new host and replicate more.
There is no advantage for the virus to ensure the host remains alive as they have already replicated and been expelled outside the body enough to continue its life cycle.
Viruses don’t “try” to do anything but reproduce. Viruses that kill their hosts too quickly are very poor at spreading and reproducing. The most immediately dangerous viruses like E bola hardly spread at all because their hosts collapse into a puddle of their own blood and scare off all the other humans. Viruses that spread well typically leave the host well enough to get around and infect other people. COVID could be spread 2 or 3 days before you started showing symptoms. The part about being sick or nearly dead or barely sick is not part of a virus’s strategy/design; it’s part of the host body’s immune system design.
Why do humans try to kill the planet that is keeping them alive?
Plagues are the way they are because they make the jump to humans from another animal. What makes one animal a little sick can be deadly to humans, and the bug doesn’t know you are a human.
Viruses dont “try” anything. They’re loose cellular nuclei carrying RNA to reprogram living cells to make more viruses. How such an arrangement came into being is still not really understood, but I’d say a virus is about as intentional in its actions as a toxic compound is in it’s reactions, they just exist and do specific things in specific conditions.
Ultimately most viruses dont kill their hosts, as doing so at least within a short period actually reduces their infection rates so high lethality is usually selected against in viruses. Highly lethal viruses that spread easily are rare for that reason, so its uncommon to see them.
You’re attributing malice to something that doesn’t have a plan or agency. It’s genetic material that exploits the opportunity to reproduce. Some of them cause symptoms that happen to up transmissibility, some of those symptoms can kill you.
It’s analogous to how humans keep polluting earth while knowing it will no longer keep them alive once it’s destroyed. Species when they reproduce they don’t take into account the destruction of the environment they live in, they just find another to populate ”and eventually destroy” or go extinct.
Most viruses that are fatal to humans would rather be making a farm animal mildly sick.
Deadly viruses are largely the result of the domestication of animals at scale. It is very rare for viruses to jump species, but since there are hundreds of millions of farm animals spending time near humans around the world, there is ample opportunity.
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