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kolbaska11 [484]
3 years ago
12

Are viral infections curable? Why or why not?

Biology
2 answers:
Lemur [1.5K]3 years ago
8 0
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Featured snippet from the web
For most viral infections, treatments can only help with symptoms while you wait for your immune system to fight off the virus. Antibiotics do not work for viral infections. There are antiviral medicines to treat some viral infections. Vaccines can help prevent you from getting many viral diseases.
Anna11 [10]3 years ago
7 0

Answer:

no.

Explanation:

Viruses, on the other hand, are not cellular. We can't kill them simply by disrupting their cells. They are infective nucleic acids which cannot replicate outside of living cells. They must invade a human cell to reproduce, because they cannot produce energy or synthesize molecules on their own. Some viruses replicate inside human cells and then bud off from the human cell inside an "envelope" made from the human cell's own membrane, which helps them evade the immune system on their way to infecting another human cell. Many viruses are protected by protein capsids, which are extremely protective--unlike a bacterial cell wall or membrane, the virus doesn't have to be alive inside the capsid or exchange nutrients and waste with the environment across the capsid; the capsid is merely there to protect the nucleic acid of the virus.

Viruses need to match some sort of receptor in order to gain entry into human cells, and in some viruses, this receptor is one of the few good targets for drug therapy; however, unlike antibacterials, the drug will only work for that particular virus/receptor, because each virus uses a different receptor.

Viruses spend time inside human cells, which protects any outer antigens from some of the aspects of the immune system. There are times when viruses are especially vulnerable during replication, but there are reasons they are harder than bacteria to target with these antireplication drugs: 1) unlike for most bacteria, the drugs need to be small enough to enter the human cell where the virus is replicating, 2) unlike for most bacteria, the drugs can't simply target a protein shared by most viruses; furthermore, many viruses hijack human proteins which cannot be targeted. Overall, there are comparatively few antiviral drugs compared to antibiotics because of the huge difficulty in obtaining selective toxicity. And 3) most drugs available target a certain step of viral replication for a certain family of viruses; however, by the time the patient shows symptoms, the virus has already created countless copies of itself or become latent in human cells, and at that point it is too late for most of the antiviral drugs to be super helpful since they target the replication itself. Even when a good antiviral drug is developed, most of them work only against a single species (or at best, a family) of viruses, which is not the case for most antibiotics.

Many viruses don't spread in ways where they can easily targeted (Polio moves from the GI tract to lymph nodes and then to the blood stream on it's way to the spinal cord to cause paralysis; it is vulnerable to the immune system in vaccinated individuals while it is forced to travel in the blood. In contrast, some viruses like rabies, herpes, and varicella-zoster spread through neurons in order to evade the immune system. Other viruses form syncytia because they travel directly from cell to cell). Also remember that some viruses integrate themselves into human DNA and remain latent for long periods of time, which prevents them from being cleared by drugs or the immune system. The human immune system does have its ways of dealing with viruses, which I can get into in greater detail in another post. For certain viruses, the only way we have to treat them is to use interferons to ramp up the immune system (a very unpleasant therapy which must often be maintained for very long periods of time).

One of the reasons that vaccines for some viruses are not effective is that oftentimes, a live (attenuated) vaccine cannot be made for those certain viruses since the reversion mutation rate is too high to provide an acceptable risk; for many viruses, only killed strains can be used, if at all. Without a live attenuated virus strain multiplying inside cells, certain critical aspects of the immune system are not activated against these certain viruses. In cases where killed viruses are able to be used as vaccines, the protection is lesser (for instance, no type-switching to IgA antibodies which would be more effective than IgM) and shorter-lived.

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