Category: Health News
Created: 9/26/2008
Last Editorial Review: 9/26/2008
There is a lot of mystique surrounding viruses, and this is unsurprising considering that being infected by something too small to see can in certain circumstances easily cause your early demise or at least a colourful and highly uncomfortable range of symptoms. In addition to that many a doctor, at a loss for a coherent diagnoses, has "blamed it on a virus."
a) bond to and so block off the virus surface "bonding" sites. This is great in theory, but as these bonding sites are molecules found on the surface of the proteins your cells actually need, it will probably do the same to those proteins and so starve your cells of them also.
Viral Infections - How Do You Get Them and Why Are They a Problem?
Once latched on they are either swallowed whole by the cell which thinks they're a yummy treat or they inject their DNA into the cell - either way the aim being to get their bit of genetic material and other enzymes into your cell. These then override your cell's protein manufacture in favour of their own viral component manufacture and so multiply themselves.
In unschooled layman's terms they can be described as tiny pieces of genetic material surrounded by a protein case. Generally too small to be seen under a "normal" microscope, a medium-sized roundish virus would be about 0.15 microns in diameter. What that means to you and me is that if a family of them held hands and made a circle around a strand of your hair, it would take about a thousand of them to complete the circle, assuming their tummies were flat and they had hands. It stands to reason that they can easily be carried in a fine sneeze mist or come through the air-conditioning at work. Not being technically "alive", they are hard to "kill" inside or outside the body.
2. Problem number two. After entering your body through an orifice or cut, they get into your mucous membranes, bloodstream, tissue fluid and float about until they find a type of cell which they can latch on to determined by the particular molecular structure of their coat - certain viruses can latch on to certain types of cell membrane molecules.
1. Problem number one. They are everywhere, especially where there are lots of people in confined spaces. You can inhale them, swallow them in your food, get them on your hands and if you rub your eyes they can get into you that way. They are carried about in your body fluids so kissing and intercourse is a good way of transferring them from one person to another. In short, viruses are very easy to "get".
So what are viruses anyway?
3. Problem number three. To invent a drug to stop this process, it has to either:
Where it does not succeed in doing this, thankfully there is another option for those humble enough to try it. There are other natural (not man-made) substances which can "fill in the gaps" where your immune system has failed. These substances are far more complex than the human mind can devise and their multiple attack strategy far too complicated to fathom. Fortunately, the Maker of man and virus has made them available for our use without our having to understand the intricacies of how they work. They are also safe to use by man or beast having no damaging side-effects.
Some varieties can keep mutating which prevents your immune system from getting rid of them and this continual warfare can result in varying degrees of ongoing fatigue. Others coat themselves with your own cellular membrane from the last destroyed cell, so fooling your antibodies into thinking they are part of you. Your other cells then "eat" this particle which, like a Trojan Horse, then releases the virus to take over another victim. Still others can hide out in various locations within your body without being detected by your immune cells.
On a more cheerful note, your ingenious immune system with its "pathogen police" seems to be able to overcome viral infections most of the time, which is why doctors tend to leave it up to them wherever possible. These immune cells ingest and destroy them, rip them apart using the bits for something else or get them filtered out of your system. They can also sometimes switch them into a dormant mode which means they behave themselves and live without doing any harm while being guests in your body. However like most parasites, they wait until your immune system is weakened for some reason and then come out of their dormant state with a vengeance.
These last conditions are obviously a problem.
This incidentally is all a highly complicated chemical process and still only partly understood by the best researchers on the planet. After replicating many times inside the cell they burst out of it, normally killing it and then move on to nearby cells so multiplying exponentially. The symptoms of a particular infection can identify the virus, they reside in and cause the same problems in the same organs in any person's body.
b) bond to the receiving sites on your cell, which defeats the necessary purpose for them being there, again starving your cells.
c) or be absorbed into your cells and interfere with the virus' interference of your cell metabolism - without causing mayhem in the cell which can do as much damage as the virus in any case. For this reason there are few anti-viral drugs and some of them tend to be used only in serious cases and under strict medical supervision because of the side-effects they can cause - including death in some cases which rather defeats their purpose. There are no doubt many other ways to tackle each individual virus strain which may eventually be discovered but the challenge is a very complicated one.
Fortunately the human body is far smarter than the human mind, and can usually bring an infection back to a state of equilibrium or dormancy or destroy it.
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